Structuralism and Semiot ics
We live in a world of signs, and of signs about signs. A growing awareness of
this situation in the last decades of the twentieth century brought a monumental change in perspective on the very nature of reality. It forced us to
recognise the possibility that ‘reality’ inheres not in things themselves, but
in the relationships we perceive between things; not in items but in structures. In exploring and seeking to further these ideas, critics turned to the
methods of analysis loosely termed ‘structuralism’ and ‘semiotics’. Their
work gave rise to a revolution in critical theory.
This classic guide discusses the nature and development of structuralism
and semiotics, calling for a new critical awareness of the ways in which we
communicate and drawing attention to their implications for our society.
Published in 1977 as the first volume in the New Accents series, Structuralism and Semiotics made crucial debates in critical theory accessible to those
with no prior knowledge of the field, thus enacting its own small revolution.
Since then a generation of readers has used the book as an entry not only
into structuralism and semiotics, but into the wide range of cultural and
critical theories underpinned by these approaches.
Structuralism and Semiotics remains the clearest introduction to some of the
most important topics in modern critical theory. An afterword and fresh
suggestions for further reading ensure that this new edition will become, like
its predecessor, the essential starting point for anyone new to the field.
Terence Hawkes is Emeritus Professor of English at Cardiff University. He
is the author of a number of books on literary theory and on Shakespeare,
including That Shakespeherian Rag (1986), Meaning by Shakespeare (1992) and
Shakespeare in the Present (2002). He is General Editor of New Accents and
of the Accents on Shakespeare series, also published by Routledge, and
was the founding Editor of Textual Practice.
IN THE SAME SERIES
Alternative Shakespeares 1, Ed. John Drakakis
Alternative Shakespeares 2, Ed. Terence Hawkes
Post-Colonial Shakespeares, Ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin
Re-reading English, Ed. Peter Widdowson
Rewriting English, Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, R. O’Rouke and Chris Weedon
English and Englishness, B. Doyle
Linguistics and the Novel, Roger Fowler
Language and Style, E. L. Epstein
The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Keir Elam
Structuralism and Semiotics, Terence Hawkes
Superstructuralism, Richard Harland
Deconstruction ed. 2, Christopher Norris
Formalism and Marxism, Tony Bennett
Critical Practice, Catherine Belsey
Dialogism, Michael Holquist
Dialogue and Difference: English for the Nineties, Ed. Peter Brooker/Peter Humm
Literature, Politics and Theory, Ed. F. Barker, P. Hulme, M. Iversen and D. Loxley
Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History, Ed. Peter Humm, Paul Stigant and
Peter Widdowson
Criticism and Society, Ed. Imre Salusinszky
Fantasy, Rosemary Jackson
Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching, Patrick Parrinder
Sexual Fiction, Maurice Charney
Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, Patricia Waugh
Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction, Steven Cohan and Linda Shires
Poetry as Discourse, Anthony Easthope
The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon
Subculture, ed. 2, Dick Hebdige
Reading Television, John Fiske and John Hartley
Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong
Adult Comics, An Introduction, Roger Sabin
The Unusable Past, Russell J. Reising
The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin
Translation Studies Ed. 2, Susan Bassnett
Studying British Cultures, Susan Bassnett
Literature and Propaganda, A. P. Foulkes
Reception Theory, Robert C. Holub
Psychoanalytic Criticism, Elizabeth Wright
The Return of the Reader, Elizabeth Freund
Sexual/Textual Politics, Toril Moi
Making a Difference, Ed. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn
AVAILABLE AS A COMPLETE SET (in Hardback only): ISBN 0415–29116–X
Terence
Hawkes
Structuralism and Semiotics
To ANN, as ever
First published 1977 by Methuen & Co. Ltd
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Second edition first published 2003
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
© 1977, 2003 Terence Hawkes
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-10051-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-43898-1 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0–415–32152–2 (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–32153–0 (pbk)
CONTENTS
General Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgements
vii
ix
1
Introduction
Vico
Piaget
Structuralism
1
1
5
6
2
Linguistics and Anthropology
Saussure
American structural linguistics
Lévi-Strauss
8
8
16
19
3
The Structures of Literature
Russian Formalism: the Knight’s Move
European structural linguistics
Jakobson
Greimas
Todorov
Barthes
44
44
56
59
69
76
86
vi
contents
4
A Science of Signs
100
5
Conclusions: New ‘New Criticism’ For Old ‘New
Criticism’?
‘New Criticism’
‘New’ New Criticism
125
125
130
Afterword (2003)
Bibliography
Further Reading (2003)
Index
134
146
166
169
GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
No doubt a third General Editor’s Preface to New Accents seems hard to
justify. What is there left to say? Twenty-five years ago, the series began
with a very clear purpose. Its major concern was the newly perplexed
world of academic literary studies, where hectic monsters called ‘Theory’, ‘Linguistics’ and ‘Politics’ ranged. In particular, it aimed itself at
those undergraduates or beginning postgraduate students who were
either learning to come to terms with the new developments or were
being sternly warned against them.
New Accents deliberately took sides. Thus the first Preface spoke darkly,
in 1977, of ‘a time of rapid and radical social change’, of the ‘erosion
of the assumptions and presuppositions’ central to the study of literature. ‘Modes and categories inherited from the past’ it announced, ‘no
longer seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generation’. The
aim of each volume would be to ‘encourage rather than resist the
process of change’ by combining nuts-and-bolts exposition of new
ideas with clear and detailed explanation of related conceptual developments. If mystification (or downright demonisation) was the
enemy, lucidity (with a nod to the compromises inevitably at stake
there) became a friend. If a ‘distinctive discourse of the future’
beckoned, we wanted at least to be able to understand it.
With the apocalypse duly noted, the second Preface proceeded
viii general editor’s preface
piously to fret over the nature of whatever rough beast might stagger
portentously from the rubble. ‘How can we recognise or deal with the
new?’, it complained, reporting nevertheless the dismaying advance of
‘a host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuring
names’ and promising a programme of wary surveillance at ‘the
boundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkable’. Its
conclusion, ‘the unthinkable, after all, is that which covertly shapes our
thoughts’ may rank as a truism. But in so far as it offered some sort of
useable purchase on a world of crumbling certainties, it is not to be
blushed for.
In the circumstances, any subsequent, and surely final, effort can
only modestly look back, marvelling that the series is still here, and not
unreasonably congratulating itself on having provided an initial outlet
for what turned, over the years, into some of the distinctive voices and
topics in literary studies. But the volumes now re-presented have more
than a mere historical interest. As their authors indicate, the issues they
raised are still potent, the arguments with which they engaged are still
disturbing. In short, we were not wrong. Academic study did change
rapidly and radically to match, even to help to generate, wide-reaching
social changes. A new set of discourses was developed to negotiate
those upheavals. Nor has the process ceased. In our deliquescent world,
what was unthinkable inside and outside the academy all those years
ago now seems regularly to come to pass.
Whether the New Accents volumes provided adequate warning of,
maps for, guides to, or nudges in the direction of this new terrain is
scarcely for me to say. Perhaps our best achievement lay in cultivating
the sense that it was there. The only justification for a reluctant third
attempt at a Preface is the belief that it still is.
TERENCE HAWKES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The late Professor John D. Jump gave the idea of this book a good deal
of encouragement at an early stage, for which I remain most grateful. I
only wish its realization were more worthy of him.
I must thank Professor Victor Erlich of Yale University for generously
making his specialized knowledge freely available to me, even as we
swam in Cape Cod Bay. And I am particularly grateful to John Hartley
of Queensland University of Technology for his tireless and scrupulous
reading of some difficult passages, and for his invaluable corrective
commentary upon them. The errors that remain are, needless to say, all
my own work.
Any book whose mode is largely one of exposition and synthesis
cannot fail to incur a wide-ranging obligation to other books. The
present case is certainly no exception, and I have tried to ensure that the
extent of that obligation is recognized for the most part in the pages
that follow. However, I must also acknowledge a particular debt to three
writers whose accounts of Structuralism have contributed decisively to
the form and content of my own: Jonathan Culler, Fredric Jameson,
Robert Scholes. I have drawn extensively upon their work and,
although I have tried to indicate the measure of my debt to it in the
normal manner in the text and bibliography, its influence throughout
has proved pervasive and formative to a degree that has ultimately
x
acknowledgements
prohibited the detailed acknowledgement that is its due. I can only
urge every reader of this book to become forthwith a reader of theirs.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the Trustees of the
Leverhulme Foundation for their generous award of a research grant
which proved especially helpful.
Finally, let me thank my own students at Cardiff, whose response to
some of this material in an earlier form amply confirmed their capacity
for the patient education of their teachers.
My greatest debt of gratitude remains what it has always been: to my
wife.
T.H.
University College
Cardiff
1
INTRODUCTION
To the average speaker of English, terms such as ‘structure’, ‘structuralist’ and ‘structuralism’ seem to have an abstract, complex, new-fangled
and possibly French air about them: a condition traditionally offering
uncontestable grounds for the profoundest mistrust.
But whatever the attractions of such anglo-saxon prejudices, they do
not, on inspection, turn out to be particularly well-founded. The concept of ‘structure’, the notion of various ‘structuralist’ stances towards
the world which might collectively be called ‘structuralism’, are not
entirely alien to our trusted ways of thinking, nor did they spring, fully
formed with horns and tail, out of the sulphurous Parisian atmosphere
of the last decade.
VICO
In 1725 the distinguished Italian jurist Giambattista Vico published a
book called The New Science. It was a momentous occasion, although it
passed virtually unnoticed at the time. For the ‘science’ Vico proposed
was nothing less than a science of human society. Its model was the
‘natural’ science of such men as Galileo, Bacon and Newton, and its
aim was to perform for ‘the world of nations’ what these renaissance
2
structuralism and semiotics
scientists had achieved for ‘the world of nature’. Its goal, in short, was
the construction of a ‘physics of man’.
The master key of the new science lay in Vico’s decisive perception
that so-called ‘primitive’ man, when properly assessed, reveals himself
not as childishly ignorant and barbaric, but as instinctively and characteristically ‘poetic’ in his response to the world, in that he possesses an
inherent ‘poetic wisdom’ (sapienza poetica) which informs his responses
to his environment and casts them in the form of a ‘metaphysics’ of
metaphor, symbol and myth.
This ‘discovery’ – achieved only with the greatest difficulty because
‘with our civilized natures we (moderns) cannot at all imagine and can
understand only by great toil the poetic nature of these first men’ (34)1
– reveals that the apparently ludicrous and fanciful accounts of creation
and the foundation of social institutions that occur in early societies,
were not intended to be taken literally. They represent, not child-like
‘primitive’ responses to reality, but responses of quite a different order
whose function was ultimately, and seriously, cognitive. That is, they
embody, not ‘lies’ about the facts, but mature and sophisticated ways of
knowing, of encoding, of presenting them. They constitute not mere
embroidery of reality, but a way of coping with it: ‘It follows that the
first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of
fables; for, as we shall see, all the histories of the gentiles have their
beginnings in fables’ (51).
Myths, properly interpreted, can thus be seen to be ‘civil histories of
the first peoples who were everywhere naturally poets’ (352). For
example,
The civil institutions in use under such kingdoms are narrated for us
by poetic history in the numerous fables that deal with contests of
song . . . and consequently refer to heroic contests over the auspices
. . . Thus the satyr Marsyas . . . when overcome by Apollo in a contest
of song, is flayed alive by the god . . . The sirens, who lull sailors to
sleep with their song and then cut their throats; the Sphinx who puts
1
The numbers refer to the passages of Vico’s The New Science as given in the revised
translation of the third edition, by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 1968.
introduction
riddles to travellers and slays them on their failure to find the solution;
Circe, who by her enchantments turns into swine the comrades of
Ulysses . . . all these portray the politics of the heroic cities. The
sailors, travellers, and wanderers of these fables are the aliens, that is,
the plebeians who, contending with the heroes for a share in the
auspices, are vanquished in the attempt and cruelly punished.
(646–8)
All myths, that is, have their grounding in the actual generalized
experience of ancient peoples, and represent their attempts to
impose a satisfactory, graspable, humanizing shape on it. That shape,
argues Vico, springs from the human mind itself, and it becomes the
shape of the world that that mind perceives as ‘natural’, ‘given’ or
‘true’.
This establishes the principle of verum factum: that which man recognizes as true (verum) and that which he has himself made (factum) are
one and the same. When man perceives the world, he perceives without knowing it the superimposed shape of his own mind, and entities
can only be meaningful (or ‘true’) in so far as they find a place within
that shape. So ‘. . . if we consider the matter well, poetic truth is metaphysical truth, and physical truth which is not in conformity with it
should be considered false’ (205).
In short, the ‘physics of man’ reveals that men have ‘created themselves’ (367), that ‘the world of civil society has certainly been made
by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the
modifications of our own human mind’ (331). Man seen thus is characteristically and pre-eminently a ‘maker’ (the Greek word for that
being ‘poet’), and the New Science will thus concentrate on a close
study of the making or ‘poeticizing’ process.
This turns out to be a two-way affair of some complexity. For not
only does man create societies and institutions in his own mind’s
image, but these in the end create him:
What Vico wanted to assert was that the first steps in the building of
the ‘world of nations’ were taken by creatures who were still (or who
had degenerated into) beasts, and that humanity itself was created by
the very same processes by which institutions were created. Humanity
3
4
structuralism and semiotics
is not a presupposition, but a consequence, an effect, a product of
institution building.
(Bergin and Fisch, Introduction, op. cit. p. xliv)
That is, man constructs the myths, the social institutions, virtually the
whole world as he perceives it, and in so doing he constructs himself.
This making process involves the continual creation of recognizable
and repeated forms which we can now term a process of structuring. Vico
sees this process as an inherent, permanent and definitive human characteristic whose operation, particularly in respect of the creation of
social institutions, is incessant and, because of its repetitive nature,
predictable in its outcome.
The nature of institutions is nothing but their coming into being at
certain times and in certain guises. Whenever the time and guise are
thus and so, such and not otherwise are the institutions that come
into being (147).
Once ‘structured’ by man, the ‘world of nations’ proves itself to be a
potent agency for continuous structuring: its customs and rites act
as a forceful brainwashing mechanism whereby human beings are
habituated to and made to acquiesce in a man-made world which they
nevertheless perceive as artless and ‘natural’.
Vico’s work ranks as one of the first modern attempts to break the
anaesthetic grip that such a permanent structuring process has on the
human mind. It thus represents one of the first modern recognitions of
that process as a definitive characteristic of that mind. The New Science
links directly with those modern schools of thought whose first premise may be said to be that human beings and human societies are not
fashioned after some model or plan which exists before they do. Like
the existentialists, Vico seems to argue that there is no pre-existent,
‘given’ human essence, no predetermined ‘human nature’. Like the
Marxists, he seems to say that particular forms of humanity are determined by particular social relations and systems of human institutions.
The one genuinely distinctive and permanent human characteristic
is discernible in the faculty of ‘poetic wisdom’, which manifests itself
as the capacity and the necessity to generate myths, and to use language
introduction
metaphorically: to deal with the world, that is, not directly but at one
remove, by means of other agencies: not literally, but ‘poetically’.
‘There must’, Vico insists, ‘in the nature of human institutions be a
mental language common to all nations which uniformly grasps the
substance of things feasible in human social life and expresses it with as
many diverse modifications as these same things may have diverse
aspects’ (161). This ‘mental language’ manifests itself as man’s universal capacity not only to formulate structures, but also to submit his
own nature to the demands of their structuring. The gift of sapienza
poetica could thus be said to be the gift of structuralism. It is a principle
which informs the way all human beings always live. To be human, it
claims, is to be a structuralist.
PIAGET
If we are all structuralists, then we ought to know what a structure is. Yet
that key concept can be uncomfortably elusive, and we ought now to
try to move rather closer to it.
One of the most fruitful attempts at a definition has been made by
Jean Piaget.1 Structure, he argues, can be observed in an arrangement of
entities which embodies the following fundamental ideas:
(a) the idea of wholeness
(b) the idea of transformation
(c) the idea of self-regulation
By wholeness is meant the sense of internal coherence. The arrangement
of entities will be complete in itself and not something that is simply a
composite formed of otherwise independent elements. Its constituent
parts will conform to a set of intrinsic laws which determine its nature
and theirs. These laws confer on the constituent parts within the structure overall properties larger than those each individually possesses
outside it. Thus a structure is quite different from an aggregate: its constituent parts have no genuinely independent existence outside the structure in the same form that they have within it.
1
Jean Piaget, Structuralism, pp. 5–16.
5
6
structuralism and semiotics
The structure is not static. The laws which govern it act so as to make
it not only structured, but structuring. Thus, in order to avoid reduction
to the level merely of passive form, the structure must be capable of
transformational procedures, whereby new material is constantly
processed by and through it. So language, a basic human structure,
is capable of transforming various fundamental sentences into the
widest variety of new utterances while retaining these within its own
particular structure.
Finally, the structure is self-regulating in the sense that it makes no
appeals beyond itself in order to validate its transformational procedures. The transformations act to maintain and underwrite the
intrinsic laws which bring them about, and to ‘seal off’ the system
from reference to other systems. A language, to take the previous
example, does not construct its formations of words by reference to the
patterns of ‘reality’, but on the basis of its own internal and selfsufficient rules. The word ‘dog’ exists, and functions within the structure of the English language, without reference to any four-legged
barking creature’s real existence. The word’s behaviour derives from its
inherent structural status as a noun rather than its referent’s actual
status as an animal. Structures are characteristically ‘closed’ in this way.
STRUCTURALISM
It follows that structuralism is fundamentally a way of thinking about
the world which is predominantly concerned with the perception and
description of structures, as defined above. As a developing concern of
modern thinkers since Vico, it is the result of a momentous historic
shift in the nature of perception which finally crystallized in the early
twentieth century, particularly in the field of the physical sciences, but
with a momentum that has carried through to most other fields. The
‘new’ perception involved the realization that despite appearances to
the contrary the world does not consist of independently existing
objects, whose concrete features can be perceived clearly and individually, and whose nature can be classified accordingly. In fact, every
perceiver’s method of perceiving can be shown to contain an inherent
bias which affects what is perceived to a significant degree. A wholly
objective perception of individual entities is therefore not possible: any
introduction
observer is bound to create something of what he observes. Accordingly,
the relationship between observer and observed achieves a kind of primacy. It becomes the only thing that can be observed. It becomes the
stuff of reality itself. Moreover the principle involved must invest the
whole of reality. In consequence, the true nature of things may be said
to lie not in things themselves, but in the relationships which we
construct, and then perceive, between them.
This new concept, that the world is made up of relationships rather
than things, constitutes the first principle of that way of thinking
which can properly be called ‘structuralist’. At its simplest, it claims
that the nature of every element in any given situation has no significance by itself, and in fact is determined by its relationship to all the
other elements involved in that situation. In short, the full significance
of any entity or experience cannot be perceived unless and until it is
integrated into the structure of which it forms a part.
It follows that the ultimate quarry of structuralist thinking will be
the permanent structures into which individual human acts, perceptions, stances fit, and from which they derive their final nature. This
will finally involve what Fredric Jameson has described as ‘an explicit
search for the permanent structures of the mind itself, the organizational categories and forms through which the mind is able to experience the world, or to organize a meaning in what is essentially in itself
meaningless’.1 The ghost of Vico clearly remains unplacated.
Nevertheless, we must set our sights a little lower than the ‘permanent structures of the mind’ for the moment, and concentrate on the
impact that the structuralist way of thinking has had on the study of
literature. As we do so, we might remind ourselves that, of all the arts,
that involving the use of words remains most closely related to that
aspect of his nature which makes man distinctive: language. And it is
not accidental that many of the concepts now central to structuralism
were first fully developed in connection with the modern study of
language: linguistics; and with the modern study of man: anthropology. Few spheres could be closer to the mind’s ‘permanent structures’
than those.
1
Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian
Formalism, p. 109.
7
2
LINGUISTICS AND
ANTHROPOLOGY
SAUSSURE
We can begin with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist
whose work forms the groundbase on which most contemporary
structuralist thinking now rests. Saussure inherited the traditional view
already referred to, that the world consists of independently existing
objects, capable of precise objective observation and classification. In
respect of linguistics this outlook yields a notion of language as an
aggregate of separate units, called ‘words’, each of which somehow has
a separate ‘meaning’ attached to it, the whole existing within a diachronic or historical dimension which makes it subject to observable and
recordable laws of change.
Saussure’s revolutionary contribution to the study of language lies in
his rejection of that ‘substantive’ view of the subject in favour of a
‘relational’ one, a change of perspective closely in accord with the
larger shift in perception mentioned above. It is recorded in his Cours de
Linguistique Générale, the account, put together from notes taken by his
students, of a series of lectures which he delivered at the University of
Geneva between 1906 and 1911, and published posthumously in
1915. The Cours presents the argument that language should be studied,
linguistics and anthropology
not only in terms of its individual parts, and not only diachronically,
but also in terms of the relationship between those parts, and synchronically:
that is, in terms of its current adequacy. In short, he proposed that a
language should be studied as a Gestalteinheit, a unified ‘field’, a selfsufficient system, as we actually experience it now.
Saussure’s insistence on the importance of the synchronic as distinct
from the diachronic study of language was momentous because it
involved recognition of language’s current structural properties as well as
its historical dimensions. As Fredric Jameson puts it ‘Saussure’s originality was to have insisted on the fact that language as a total system is
complete at every moment, no matter what happens to have been
altered in it a moment before.’1 Each language, that is, has a wholly
valid existence apart from its history, as a system of sounds issuing from
the lips of those who speak it now, and whose speech in fact constructs
and constitutes the language (usually in ignorance of its history) in its
present form.
Saussure begins with a consideration of the whole phenomenon of
language in terms of two fundamental dimensions which it exhibits:
that of langue and that of parole. The dialectical distinction he draws
between these two has proved of fundamental importance to the
development of linguistics in general and of structuralism in particular.
The distinction between langue and parole is more or less that which
pertains between the abstract language-system which in English we call
simply ‘language’, and the individual utterances made by speakers of
the language in concrete everyday situations which we call ‘speech’.
Saussure’s own analogy is the distinction between the abstract set of
rules and conventions called ‘chess’, and the actual concrete games of
chess played by people in the real world. The rules of chess can be said
to exist above and beyond each individual game, and yet they only ever
acquire concrete form in the relationships that develop between the
pieces in individual games. So with language. The nature of the langue
lies beyond, and determines, the nature of each manifestation of parole,
yet it has no concrete existence of its own, except in the piecemeal
manifestations that speech affords.
Man can be described as the animal who characteristically devises
1
Jameson, op. cit., pp. 5–6.
9
10
structuralism and semiotics
and invests in language: that is, in a complex system or structure of
correspondences between distinct signs, and distinct ideas or ‘meanings’ to which those signs distinctively relate. It happens – perhaps by
accident – that the vocal apparatus has become the chief instrument
and vehicle for language’s concrete actualization in the real world of
social intercourse. Nevertheless, ‘. . . what is natural to mankind is not
oral speech but the faculty of constructing a language, i.e. a system of
distinct signs corresponding to distinct ideas’ (p. 10).1 This faculty,
termed ‘the linguistic faculty proper’ lies in fact ‘beyond the functioning of the various organs’, and may be thought of as ‘a more general
faculty which governs signs’ (p. 11). And what that faculty or power to
construct signs generates in respect of language may be thought of as
the larger structure which, though we never see or hear it in actual
physical terms, can be deduced from its momentary manifestation in
actual human utterances. Langue is therefore ‘both a social product of
the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that
have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise
that faculty’ (p. 9). Parole, it follows, is the small part of the iceberg that
appears above the water. Langue is the larger mass that supports it, and is
implied by it, both in speaker and hearer, but which never itself
appears.
The fact that language is intangible and never appears all at once in
its entirety, but only in the incomplete performance of part of the
repertoire by individual speakers has, since Saussure, offered a fruitful
direction in which modern linguistics might move. That is, towards a
description of the full pattern of systematized relationships which
individual utterances and understanding point at and presuppose:
towards, to use the modified terminology proposed by more recent
linguists such as Noam Chomsky, an account of the system of ‘competence’ that must precede, and that must (to use his terminology
again) ‘generate’ individual ‘performance’. Not surprisingly, where
individual performance, or parole seems heterogeneous, without pattern,
without systematic coherence, its preceding competence, or langue seems
homogeneous. It exhibits, in short, a discernible structure.
1
Page references are to the translation of Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique Générale by Wade
Baskin; Course in General Linguistics, New York, 1959.
linguistics and anthropology
The full implications of this turn out to be fundamentally challenging, in that they require us to relinquish what Charles C. Fries has
called an ‘item-centered’ view of the world, and the ‘word-centred
thinking about language’1 produced by it, in favour of the sort of
‘relational’ or ‘structural’ view already referred to. If no ‘item’ has any
significance by itself, but derives its significance entirely from its relationship with other items, then this must affect our thinking about
language at a very basic level. We can begin with the sounds made by the
human voice.
At this fundamental phonetic level, it quickly becomes clear that a large
number of different ‘items’ are indeed in operation, and we only have
to listen to an ordinary conversation to establish their range and complexity. Yet it is also clear that what makes any single item ‘meaningful’
is not its own particular individual quality, but the difference between
this quality and that of other sounds. In fact, the differences are systematized into ‘oppositions’ which are linked in crucial relationships.
Thus, in English, the established difference between the initial sound of tin
and the initial sound of kin is what enables a different ‘meaning’ to be
given to each word. This is to say that the meaning of each word
resides in a structural sense in the difference between its own sounds
and those of other words. In this case, the English language has registered the contrast or sense of ‘opposition’ between the sound of /t/ in
tin and the sound of /k/ in kin as significant, that is, as capable of
generating meaning.
However, much more crucial is the fact that by no means every
possible contrast is registered as significant by the language. In fact,
large numbers of contrasts are ignored by it, and only a relatively small
proportion of the differences that actually occur between sounds are
recognized as different for the purpose of forming words and creating
meaning. Those that are not so recognized – however different they
may be in fact – are simply lumped together as ‘the same’. For example,
the /p/ sound as it occurs in pin is obviously very different from what
we habitually term ‘the same’ /p/ sound as it appears in spin: and there
is a no less clear difference between the first consonant of coal and the
first consonant of call. No ‘foreign’ speaker of English would ever call
1
Charles C. Fries, Linguistics and Reading, p. 64.
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these sounds ‘the same’. We do, simply because the differences
between them are not ‘recognized’ in English, in the sense that they are
never used to distribute ‘meaning’ between words.
What we encounter here is a fundamental structuring principle. It is
one which characteristically overrides the ‘actual’ nature of individual
items, and systematically imposes its own shape or pattern upon them.
When we look closely at the process we can see that it works by forcing
us (whether we like it or not) to distinguish between two kinds or
levels of ‘difference’. There is that which actually occurs (coal/call) on the
phonetic level, but which the structure of the language does not register,
and which its speakers accordingly do not, when they speak the language, recognize. And then there is that which also actually occurs, but
which since the structure of the language does take account of it, is
recognized. This ‘recognized’ level is called the phonemic level, the items
which appear on it are called phonemes, and it is these sounds (as in the
first consonants of tin and kin) that the speakers of the language hear as
‘different’, that is, as opposed in a pattern of meaningful contrasts. The
point is that of the many ‘samenesses’ or differences that actually occur
(or have diachronically occurred) in the language, we only perceive
those which the language’s synchronic structure makes meaningful, and
vice versa.
The arrangement which makes them so could be called both arbitrary and systematic. ‘Arbitrary’ because it is self-contained and selfjustifying: there is no appeal possible beyond it to some category of the
‘natural’ or the ‘real’ which would justify tin/kin’s ‘difference’ and
deny that of coal/call. And ‘systematic’ because, by the same token, we
feel ourselves to be in the presence (and in the grip) of a firmly rooted
and overriding system of relationships governed by general laws which
determine the status of each and every individual item it contains.
Such a system, encountered even at this primary level, can properly
be termed structural. It is perceived as a synchronic phenomenon. And
since it occurs at the very moment when language emerges as speech,
the phonemic principle which animates it can be said to be a (if not the)
fundamental structural concept. The notion of a complex pattern of
paired functional differences, of ‘binary opposition’ as it has been
termed, is clearly basic to it. In fact, the principle is common to
all languages. As Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle point out, the
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discernment of binary opposition is a child’s ‘first logical operation’,
and in that operation we see the primary and distinctive intervention of
culture into nature.1 There are thus grounds for recognizing, in the
capacity for the creation and perception of binary or paired ‘opposites’,
and in the cognate activity of the creation and perception of phonemic
patterning at large, a fundamental and characteristic operation of the
human mind. It is an operation which creates structures.
But Saussure goes further. Language, after all, inheres not in ‘the
material substance of words’ (p. 18) but in the larger and abstract
‘system of signs’ of which those words are the barest tip. In fact, ‘signs
and their relations are what linguistics studies’ (p. 102) and the nature
both of signs and of the relationship between them is also seen to be
structural.
The linguistic sign can be characterized in terms of the relationship
which pertains between its dual aspects of ‘concept’ and of ‘soundimage’ – or, to use the terms which Saussure’s work has made famous –
signified (signifié) and signifier (signifiant). The structural relationship
between the concept of a tree (i.e. the signified) and the sound-image
made by the word ‘tree’ (i.e. the signifier) thus constitutes a linguistic
sign, and a language is made up of these: it is ‘a system of signs that
express ideas’ (p. 16).
Since language is fundamentally an auditory system, the relationship
between signifier and signified unfolds during a passage of time. Where
a painting can display and juxtapose its elements at the same time,
verbal utterance lacks that kind of simultaneity and is forced to deliver
its elements in a certain order or sequence which is itself significant. In
short, the mode of the relationship between signifier and signified can
be said to be essentially, albeit minimally, sequential in nature.
The overall characteristic of this relationship is one that we have
already encountered: it is arbitrary. There exists no necessary ‘fitness’
in the link between the sound-image, or signifier ‘tree’, the concept, or
signified that it involves, and the actual physical tree growing in the
earth. The word ‘tree’, in short, has no ‘natural’ or ‘tree-like’ qualities,
and there is no appeal open to a ‘reality’ beyond the structure of the
language in order to underwrite it.
1
Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language, pp. 60–1.
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The very arbitrariness of the linguistic sign protects it from change.
As Saussure says ‘any subject in order to be discussed must have a
reasonable basis’ (p. 73). But the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is
not ‘reasonable’, and so it cannot be discussed in the sense that we
cannot profitably consider or debate its adequacy. The sign is simply
there. There is literally no reason to prefer any other word from any
other source, arbre, baum, arbor or even an invented word, fnurd, to ‘tree’.
None is more adequate or ‘reasonable’ than another. The word ‘tree’
means the physical leafy object growing in the earth because the structure of the language makes it mean that, and only validates it when it does
so. It follows that language acts as a great conservative force in human
apprehension of the world.
In fact, the very arbitrariness of the relationship between signifier
and signified that makes language conservative in nature also serves to
guarantee the ‘structural’ nature of the system in which it occurs in
precisely the terms put forward by Piaget. Language is self-defining,
and so whole and complete. It is capable of a process of ‘transformation’: that is, of generating new aspects of itself (new sentences) in
response to new experience. It is self-regulating. It has these capacities
precisely because it allows no single, unitary appeals to a ‘reality’
beyond itself. In the end, it constitutes its own reality.
In other words, language stands as the supreme example of a selfcontained ‘relational’ structure whose constituent parts have no significance unless and until they are integrated within its bounds. As
Saussure puts it, ‘Language is a system of inter-dependent terms in
which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous
presence of the others’ (p. 114).
If all aspects of the language are thus ‘based on relations’ (p. 122)
two dimensions of these relationships must assume particular importance. Saussure presents these as the linguistic sign’s syntagmatic (or
‘horizontal’) relations, and its simultaneous associative (or ‘vertical’)
relations.
It has been pointed out that the mode of language is fundamentally
one of sequential movement through time. It follows from this that
each word will have a linear or ‘horizontal’ relationship with the words
that precede and succeed it, and a good deal of its capacity to ‘mean’
various things derives from this pattern of positioning. In the sentence
linguistics and anthropology
‘the boy kicked the girl’, the meaning ‘unrolls’ as each word follows its
predecessor and is not complete until the final word comes into place.
This constitutes language’s syntagmatic aspect, and it could also be
thought of as its ‘diachronic’ aspect because of its commitment to the
passage of time.
But each word will also have relationships with other words in the
language that do not occur at this point in time, but are capable of doing
so. The word, that is, has ‘formulaic’ associations with those other
words from among which it has, so to speak, been chosen. And these
other words, ‘part of the inner storehouse that makes up the language
of each speaker’ (p. 123) – they might be synonyms, antonyms, words
of similar sound or of the same grammatical function – help, by not
being chosen, to define the meaning of the word which has. It obviously follows from our notion of language as a self-contained structure
that the absence of certain words partly creates and certainly winnows
and refines the meanings of those that are present, and in the above
sentence, part of the meaning of ‘kicked’ derives from the fact that it
turns out not to be ‘kissed’ or ‘killed’ as the full relationships of the
words in the sentence are unrolled. These kinds of relationships can be
thought of as on a ‘vertical’ plane to distinguish them from the simultaneously operating yet quite distinct relationships of the horizontal,
syntagmatic plane. They constitute the word’s associative aspect, and
obviously form part of its ‘synchronic’ relationship with the whole
language structure (pp. 122–7).
Thus, the value of any linguistic ‘item’ is finally and wholly determined by its total environment: ‘it is impossible to fix even the value of
the word signifying “sun” without first considering its surroundings:
in some languages it is not possible to say “sit in the sun” ’ (p. 116).
Ultimately, it seems that the very concepts a language expresses are also
defined and determined by its structure. They exist, not intrinsically, as
themselves (‘Hebrew does not recognize even the fundamental distinctions between the past, present and future. Proto-Germanic has no
special form for the future’ (pp. 116–17)) and not positively, by their
actual content, but negatively, by their formal differentiating relations
with the other terms in the structure. ‘Their most precise characteristic
is in being what the others are not’ (p. 117).
In thus focusing attention on what might be called the distinctive
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‘oppositional’ mode in which linguistic structures are cast, Saussure
seems finally to reinforce their ‘closed’ self-sufficient, self-defining
nature, and to make them look inwards, to their own mechanisms, not
outwards to a ‘real’ world that lies beyond them. Signs, like phonemes,
function ‘not through their intrinsic value but through their relative
position’, and thus – since the total mode of language is oppositional –
‘. . . whatever distinguishes one sign from the others constitutes it.’ As
a result, ‘in language there are only differences without positive terms.
Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither
ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only
conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system’
(pp. 118–21).
Language seen thus must finally be judged to be ‘a form and not a
substance’ (p. 122): it is a structure which has modes, rather than an
aggregate of items which has content.
And since this self-regarding, self-regulating form constitutes our
characteristic means of encountering and of coping with the world
beyond ourselves, then perhaps we can say that it constitutes the characteristic human structure. From there, it is only a small step to the
argument that perhaps it also constitutes the characteristic structure of
human reality.
That step takes us across the Atlantic.
AMERICAN STRUCTURAL LINGUISTICS
We have noted that Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique Générale was first
delivered as a series of lectures in Geneva between 1906 and 1911. In
the form of notes taken by students, the Cours was published posthumously in French in 1915. Although its ideas proved widely influential in Europe, the First World War broke down contacts between European linguists and those active in North America, the rift was widened
by the Second World War, and an English translation of Saussure’s Cours
did not appear until 1959.
As a result of this, and also as a result of the existence to hand, as it
were, of a large number of Indian languages unknown to European
linguists, the study of language in North America became a separate
and independently flourishing growth. In Saussure’s terms, its main
linguistics and anthropology
thrust was towards synchronic accounts of native Indian languages.
These were often begun for the purposes of furthering religious missionary work, but an additional impetus came from a sense of urgency
that many of these languages were fast disappearing. The necessity
simply to record and analyse them took precedence over any concern
with the construction of general linguistic theories to an extent that
seemed to make the term ‘descriptive linguistics’ wholly appropriate as
far as its early practitioners, such as Franz Boas (1858–1942), as well as
its historians were concerned.
One of the most important and influential of the American ‘descriptive’ linguists after Boas was Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and it was his
work which formed the basis of what in America came to be termed
‘structural linguistics’. As Fries argues, Sapir’s book Language (1921)
marks a significant breakthrough, for in it he records his growing
awareness that languages operate by means of some kind of inherent
structuring principle which simply overrides the ‘objective’ observations
and expectations of the non-native speaker, who listens from ‘outside’:
I found that it was difficult or impossible to teach an Indian to make
phonetic distinctions that did not correspond to ‘points in the pattern
of his language’ however these differences might strike our objective
ear, but that subtle, barely audible phonetic differences, if only they hit
the ‘points in the pattern’ were easily and voluntarily expressed in
writing . . .
(Language p. 56n.)
In short, like Saussure, Sapir discovered that the phonetic difference
between two sounds only becomes meaningful to the native speaker
when it coincides with the phonemic structure (or ‘points in the pattern’) of the language in which it occurs. Moreover, that structure has a
considerable ‘anaesthetic’ effect on the native speaker’s perception of
his own language. He finds it very difficult to hear distinctions that the
phonemic structure does not ‘recognize’.
By the time Leonard Bloomfield had published his enormously
influential book Language (1933) linguistics in America had followed
Sapir’s insights to such a degree that it could be called ‘structural’
without falsification, although the term conventionally applied to this
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mode of linguistic analysis remained the looser one ‘descriptive’. The
climax of work in this vein, certainly in the field of phonology, is
probably represented by the publication in 1951 of Trager and Smith’s
significantly titled Outline of English Structure.
Meanwhile, as a result of first hand contact with ‘exotic’ cultures that
had been denied to European linguists, American structural linguistics
– always closely linked with anthropology – had made progress in
another area: that of the relationship between language and the cultural
‘setting’ in which it occurred. As the life of Indian tribesmen came
more and more closely to be studied, this relationship seemed to have
both a reflective and a formative character.
We have noticed that a language’s structuring agency seems to exert
an ‘anaesthetic’ power which makes it difficult for its speakers to register sounds that do not conform to the ‘contrastive’ or oppositional
patterns of its phonemes. The same power makes it very difficult for us
even to form or utter sounds used phonemically in other languages that
do not fit the phonemic structure of our own. This is what gives
foreign speakers their ‘foreign’ accents. The silent effectiveness of this
power is such that it would therefore be surprising if each language’s
structure did not finally make its impress upon habits of perception
and response that ultimately extend beyond itself. And indeed, when
Sapir, and later the influential B. L. Whorf, made their initial extensions
of linguistic structuring into other fields of social behaviour, they
quickly reached the conclusion that the ‘shape’ of a culture, or total
way of life of a community, was in fact determined by – or at any rate
clearly ‘structured’ in the same way as – that culture’s language. There
is therefore, concluded Sapir in a classic statement, no such thing as an
objective, unchanging ‘real world’:
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in
the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much
at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium
of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that
one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that
language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of
communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real
world’ is to a large extent built up on the language habits of the group.
linguistics and anthropology
No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as
representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different
societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience
very largely as we do because the language habits of our community
predispose certain choices of interpretation.
(Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality, p. 162)
The assumption fundamental to this conception is that the world of
space and time is in fact a continuum, without firm and irrevocable
boundaries or divisions, which each language divides up and encodes
in accordance with its own particular structure. As Dorothy Lee
expresses it,
. . . a member of a given society – who, of course, codifies experienced
reality through the use of the specific language and other patterned
behaviour characteristic of his culture – can actually grasp reality only
as it is presented to him in this code. The assumption is not that
reality itself is relative, but that it is differently punctuated and categorized by participants of different cultures, or that different aspects of it
are noticed by, or presented to, them.1
In short, a culture comes to terms with nature by means of ‘encoding’,
through language. And it requires only a slight extension of this view
to produce the implication that perhaps the entire field of social
behaviour which constitutes the culture might in fact also represent an
act of ‘encoding’ on the model of language. In fact, it might itself be a
language.
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS
This, in essence, was the view taken by a number of anthropologists
whose work began to appear during and just after the Second World
War. Chief among them, and the one whose committed pursuit of the
1
Dorothy Lee, ‘Lineal and nonlineal codifications of reality’ in Edmund Carpenter and
Marshall McLuhan (eds.) Explorations in Communication, Boston, 1960, pp. 136–54.
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principles involved has most helped to attract the epithet ‘structuralist’
to his discipline, was the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
The notion of a myth-making ‘poetic wisdom’ which animates the
response to the world of so-called ‘primitive peoples’ is a fundamental
principle of Lévi-Strauss’s thought. This of course links him directly
with Vico, a connection confirmed by his ultimate aim to produce a
‘general science of man’ as well as by his basic conviction that ‘men
have made themselves to no less an extent than they have made the races
of their domestic animals, the only difference being that the process
has been less conscious or voluntary’.1 The same concern also links
him with the thinking of Marx and Lévi-Strauss has acknowledged that
connection in his remark that ‘the famous statement by Marx, “men
make their own history, but they do not know that they are making it”
justifies first, history, and second, anthropology’ (SA, p. 23).
However, while he also shares Vico’s interest in language as a major
aspect of the ‘science of man’, he is to be distinguished both from the
Italian jurist and the German philosopher by the extent of his concern
to utilize the methods of modern linguistics in his analysis of nonlinguistic data: by his very American notion (directly derived, as he recognizes, from the work of Whorf, Sapir and others) that since language
is man’s overwhelmingly distinctive feature, it constitutes ‘at once the
prototype of the cultural phenomenon (distinguishing man from the animals) and the phenomenon whereby all the forms of social life are
established and perpetuated (SA, pp. 358–9). As he put it in his famous
book Tristes Tropiques (1955) ‘Qui dit homme, dit langage, et qui dit
langage dit société.’
The central question to emerge from such a viewpoint is the one
raised above: in Lévi-Strauss’s words, ‘whether the different aspects of
social life (including even art and religion) cannot only be studied by
the methods of, and with the help of concepts similar to those
employed in linguistics, but also whether they do not constitute phenomena whose inmost nature is the same as that of language’ (SA,
p. 62).
If that were indeed the case, then the analysis of language would
1
‘Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (Penguin Books, 1972), p. 353. I shall hereafter refer to this work as SA.
linguistics and anthropology
obviously suggest an appropriate model for the analysis of culture at
large. And at one level, however manifold and complex his contribution to the broader fields of ‘structuralism’ might be, the general
drift of Lévi-Strauss’s work has ultimately been directed towards an
investigation of the validity of that proposition.
Like the linguist, he sets out to identify the genuinely constitutive
elements of what appears at first sight to be an apparently disparate and
shapeless mass of phenomena. His method, fundamentally, involves
the application to this non-linguistic material of the principles of what
he himself terms the ‘phonological revolution’ brought about by the
linguist’s concept of the phoneme. That is, he attempts to perceive the
constituents of cultural behaviour, ceremonies, rites, kinship relations,
marriage laws, methods of cooking, totemic systems, not as intrinsic or
discrete entities, but in terms of the contrastive relationships they have
with each other that make their structures analogous to the phonemic
structure of a language. Thus, ‘like phonemes, kinship terms are elements of meaning; like phonemes, they acquire meaning only if they are
integrated into systems’ (SA, p. 34) and ‘like language . . . the cuisine of
a society may be analysed into constituent elements, which in this case
we might call “gustemes”, and which may be organized according to
certain structures of opposition and correlation’ (SA, p. 86).
To correct the error of Whorf, whose studies Lévi-Strauss sees as
lacking an integrating theory, being merely empirical, atomistic, and
concerned with the parts and not the whole of a culture (SA, p. 85),
these systems should be seen to combine to form ‘a kind of language, a
set of processes, permitting the establishment between individuals and
groups, of a certain type of communication’ (SA, p. 61). Each system,
that is, kinship, food, political ideology, marriage ritual, cooking, etc.
constitutes a partial expression of the total culture, conceived ultimately
as a single gigantic language. Moreover, ‘. . . if we find these structures to
be common to several spheres, we have the right to conclude that we
have reached a significant knowledge of the unconscious attitudes of
the society or societies under consideration’ (SA, p. 87).
Perhaps the best way of indicating the fruitful nature of this pursuit
of ‘unconscious attitudes’ is to try to give an account of Lévi-Strauss’s
analysis of three specific ‘systems’ which seem to yield valuable
material: those of kinship, myth, and the nature of the ‘savage’ mind.
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Kinship
All societies have ‘kinship’ systems: that is, sets of ‘rules’ concerning
who may – and more often who may not – marry whom and prescribing the nature of familial relationships at large. (A good example is the
‘Table of Kindred and Affinity’ in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer.) Lévi-Strauss proposes that such systems, or ‘structures’, may
be homologous with the structure of the language of the society
involved in them on the grounds that ‘different types of communication systems in the same societies – that is, kinship and language’ may
in effect be produced by ‘identical unconscious structures’ (SA, p. 62).
In any event, following the fundamental structuralist (and ‘phonemic’)
principle that the relationship between phenomena determines their
nature, not any intrinsic aspect of the phenomena themselves, LéviStrauss is able to look at the broader implications of kinship relationships in a new light. For instance, his view of the function of the
exchange of women, or of the role of uncles (the avunculate) in primitive
societies seems at once more profound and informative than that available to more ‘empirical’ observers.
According to Radcliffe-Brown, the term avunculate covers two antithetical systems of attitudes. In one case, the maternal uncle represents family authority; he is feared and obeyed, and possesses certain
rights over his nephew. In the other case, the nephew holds privileges
of familiarity in relation to his uncle and can treat him more or less as
his victim. Second, there is a correlation between the boy’s attitude
towards his maternal uncle and his attitude towards his father. We find
the two systems of attitudes in both cases, but they are inversely
correlated. In groups where familiarity characterizes the relationship
between father and son, the relationship between maternal uncle and
nephew is one of respect; and where the father stands as the austere
representative of family authority, it is the uncle who is treated with
familiarity.
(SA, pp. 40–1)
By realizing that the two sets of attitudes involved here ‘constitute (as
the structural linguist would say) two pairs of oppositions’ Lévi-Strauss
linguistics and anthropology
is able to offer a radical modification of Radcliffe-Brown’s view which,
he argues, ‘arbitrarily isolates particular elements of a global structure
which must be treated as a whole’. Going beyond the limits of the
‘empirical’ scheme, and thus treating the whole structure involved, he
ultimately discerns, to his own satisfaction at least, a general law:
When we consider societies of the Cherkess and Trobriand types it is
not enough to study the correlation of attitudes between father/son
and uncle/sister’s son. This correlation is only one aspect of a global
system containing four types of relationships which are organically
linked, namely: brother/sister, husband/wife, father/son, and mother’s
brother/sister’s son. The two groups in our example illustrate a law
which can be formulated as follows: In both groups, the relation
between maternal uncle and nephew is to the relation between brother
and sister as the relation between father and son is to that between
husband and wife. Thus if we know one pair of relations, it is always
possible to infer the other.
(SA, p. 42)
Finally it becomes clear, after a lengthy analysis, that the avunculate
system itself is structurally determined:
Thus we see that in order to understand the avunculate we must treat
it as one relationship within a system, while the system itself must be
considered as a whole in order to grasp its structure. This structure
rests upon four terms (brother, sister, father, and son), which are
linked by two pairs of correlative oppositions in such a way that in
each of the two generations there is always a positive relationship and
a negative one. Now, what is the nature of this structure, and what is
its function? The answer is as follows: This structure is the most
elementary form of kinship that can exist. It is, properly speaking, the
unit of kinship.
(SA, p. 46)
The ‘primitive and irreducible character’ of this basic unit turns out
on scrutiny to be ‘actually a direct result of the universal presence of an
incest taboo’ since, in human society, ‘a man must obtain a woman
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from another man, who gives him a daughter or a sister’. Hence, the
presence of the maternal uncle in certain kinship structures is ‘given’
and, a fact which is invisible to mere empirical observation, functions
as ‘a necessary precondition for the structure to exist’ (SA, p. 46).
Thus, if the biological family (which always exists) represents the
gross ‘phonetic’ data of the kinship system, Lévi-Strauss feels that his
own work enables him to describe items within it which have ‘phonemic’ status:
. . . we have interpreted the avunculate as a characteristic trait of
elementary structure. This elementary structure, which is the product
of defined relations involving four terms, is, in our view, the true atom
of kinship. Nothing can be conceived or given beyond the fundamental
requirements of its structure, and, in addition, it is the sole building
block of more complex systems.
(SA, p. 48)
In so far as traditional anthropological studies were unable to reach
such conclusions, Lévi-Strauss feels justified in claiming that in this as
in other respects, ‘the error of traditional anthropology, like that of
traditional linguistics, was to consider the terms and not the relations
between the terms’ (SA, p. 46). In this sense, the anthropologist deals,
not in the ‘objectively’ observed facts of ‘nature’ but in those structures
which the human mind characteristically superimposes on it:
Of course, the biological family is ubiquitous in human society. But
what confers upon kinship its socio-cultural character is not what it
retains from nature, but, rather, the essential way in which it diverges
from nature. A kinship system does not consist in the objective ties of
descent or consanguinity between individuals. It exists only in human
consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the
spontaneous development of a real situation.
(SA, p. 50)
The social function of such a system is itself ‘structural’:
. . . kinship systems, marriage rules, and descent groups constitute a
co-ordinated whole, the function of which is to insure the permanency
linguistics and anthropology
of the social group by means of intertwining consanguineous and
affinal ties. They may be considered as the blueprint of a mechanism
which ‘pumps’ women out of their consanguineous families to
redistribute them in affinal groups, the result of this process being to
create new consanguineous groups, and so on.
(SA, p. 309)
From this kind of emphasis on its ‘arbitrary’ and its ‘systematic’ character, the kinship system emerges clearly as ‘a language’ (SA, p. 47) – a
structured and structuring system of signs, whose mode is symbolic,
self-regulating and self-sufficient, requiring no reference to a ‘reality’
or ‘nature’ beyond itself to justify or validate its procedures:
Because they are symbolic systems, kinship systems offer the anthropologist a rich field, where his efforts can almost (and we emphasize
the ‘almost’) converge with those of the most highly developed of the
social sciences, namely, linguistics. But to achieve this convergence,
from which it is hoped a better understanding of man will result, we
must never lose sight of the fact that, in both anthropological and
linguistic research, we are dealing strictly with symbolism. And
although it may be legitimate or even inevitable to fall back upon a
naturalistic interpretation in order to understand the emergence of
symbolic thinking, once the latter is given, the nature of the explanation must change as radically as the newly appeared phenomenon
differs from those which have preceded and prepared it. Hence, any
concession to naturalism might jeopardize the immense progress
already made in linguistics, which is also beginning to characterize the
study of family structure, and might drive the sociology of the family
toward a sterile empiricism, devoid of inspiration.
(SA, p. 51)
Myth
Of course, language itself remains the ‘semantic system par excellence: it
cannot but signify, and exists only through signification’ (SA, p. 48).
Nevertheless, from this sort of analysis it is quickly apparent that, like
linguistics, anthropology is not concerned with the ‘surface’ of social
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life as consciously experienced by the member of the community, any
more than the linguist is really concerned with the native speaker’s
often misleading conscious notions about the way his own language
works. Mere empiricism is not enough. Mere ‘naturalism’ is misleading.
In fact, the anthropologist’s concern lies with the ‘unconscious foundations’ (SA, p. 18) on which that social life – and that language – rest. His
quarry, in short, is the langue of the whole culture; its system and its
general laws: he stalks it through the particular varieties of its parole.
The efficacy of these ‘unconscious foundations’ can be seen when
they are tapped in such events as the shaman’s (medicine man’s) ‘curing’ of the sick in so-called primitive communities. As Lévi-Strauss
points out, where modern science encourages us to see a causal relationship between germs and disease, the shaman’s ‘cure’ rests upon his
ability to relate the disease to the world of myth and monsters in which
the sick person genuinely believes:
That the mythology of the shaman does not correspond to an objective reality does not matter. The sick woman believes in the myth and
belongs to a society which believes in it. The tutelary spirits and
malevolent spirits, the supernatural monsters and magical animals,
are all part of a coherent system on which the native conception of
the universe is founded. The sick woman accepts these mythical
beings or, more accurately, she has never questioned their existence.
What she does not accept are the incoherent and arbitrary pains,
which are an alien element in her system but which the shaman, calling upon myth, will re-integrate within a whole where everything is
meaningful.
Once the sick woman understands, however, she does more than
resign herself; she gets well.
(SA, p. 197)
In effect, what happens is that
The shaman provides the sick woman with a language, by means of
which unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be
immediately expressed. And it is the transition to this verbal expression – at the same time making it possible to undergo in an ordered
linguistics and anthropology
and intelligible form a real experience that would otherwise be chaotic
and inexpressible – which induces the release of the physiological
process, that is, the reorganization, in a favourable direction, of the
process to which the sick woman is subjected.
(Ibid., p. 198)
The relationship between language and myth thus occupies a central
position in Lévi-Strauss’s view of the ‘savage’ mind, and he argues that
the nature of that mind reveals itself in the structures of its myths as
much as in the structure of its language.
In the past, he points out, myths have been subjected to methods of
interpretation which seriously conflict, not only with each other, but
with the essential nature of the myths themselves. They have been seen
as collective ‘dreams’, as the basis of ritual, as the result of ‘a kind of
esthetic play’, and mythological figures themselves have been thought
of as ‘personified abstractions, divinized heroes, or fallen gods’ (SA, p.
207). None of this can be considered satisfactory since it serves merely
to reduce mythology to the level of childlike ‘play’, and denies it any
more sophisticated relationship with the world, and with the society
that generates it.
Lévi-Strauss’s concern is ultimately with the extent to which the
structures of myths prove actually formative as well as reflective of
men’s minds: the degree to which they dissolve the distinction
between nature and culture. And so his aim, he says, is not to show
how men think in myths, but ‘how myths think in men, unbeknown to
them’.1 As in the case of kinship, the ‘unconscious’ structure of myth
turns out to yield itself most readily to a ‘phonemic’ analysis of its
phenomena, whereby the fantastic profusion of myths in the world
may be reduced to a manageable number of recurrent elements, whose
presence has genuine structural and structuring significance:
Whether the myth is recreated by the individual or borrowed from
tradition, it derives from its sources – individual or collective . . .
– only the stock of representations with which it operates. But the
1
‘Les mythes se pensent dans les hommes, et à leur insu’. Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le Cuit,
p. 20.
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structuralism and semiotics
structure remains the same, and through it the symbolic function is
fulfilled . . . There are many languages, but very few structural laws
which are valid for all languages. A compilation of known tales and
myths would fill an imposing number of volumes. But they can be
reduced to a small number of simple types if we abstract from among
the diversity of characters a few elementary functions.
(SA, pp. 203–4)
But as we pursue that small number of ‘elementary functions’, and
seek to determine the nature of those structures which derive from
them, mythology confronts us with a central problem:
On the one hand it would seem that in the course of a myth anything
is likely to happen. There is no logic, no continuity. Any characteristic
can be attributed to any subject; every conceivable relation can be
found. With myth, everything becomes possible. But on the other
hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity
between myths collected in widely different regions . . . If the content
of a myth is contingent, how are we going to explain the fact that
myths throughout the world are so similar?
(SA, p. 208)
We can begin with the fundamental proposition mentioned above,
that myth has obvious connections with language itself: ‘to be known,
myth has to be told: it is a part of human speech’ (SA, p. 209) and so
the analysis of it can properly aim to be ‘the extension, to another field,
of structural linguistics’ (SA, p. 233).
Of course, the analogy is not exact and myth cannot be simply
treated as language, for ‘in order to preserve its specificity we must be
able to show that it is both the same thing as language and also something different from it’. This ‘sameness and difference’ in fact is partly
provided for in Saussure’s fruitful distinction between langue and parole,
structure and individual event. Myth obviously embodies this distinction in that the individual version of each myth, its parole, derives from
and contributes to the fundamental structure of its langue: Sophocles’s
Oedipus Rex derives, as parole, from the langue of the total Oedipus myth.
However, a third level is also discernible. A myth is always, in its
linguistics and anthropology
individual telling, located in time: it always refers to events alleged to
have happened a long time ago. Yet, in operation, the specific pattern or
structure of events described is bound to be timeless; embracing, and
linking in an explanatory mode the present with both past and future,
while it is told. Thus, each time the myth is recounted, it combines
both the elements of langue and parole, and in so doing transcends both,
being, as an ‘explanation’ of the world, trans-historical and transcultural. This has its effect on the language involved. For the power of
the original myth can never be affected by the way in which any particular version of it is recounted. Unlike poetry, myth does not suffer by
‘translation’: the poorest linguistic rendition of the events in the story
is adequate to transmit the ‘mythical value’ of the myth. And so the
language used in myth presents us with a peculiar sense of the existence of another meaningful level of operation beyond, or perhaps
behind, the purely linguistic one:
Whatever our ignorance of the language and the culture of the people
where it originated, a myth is still felt as a myth by any reader anywhere
in the world. Its substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or
its syntax, but in the story which it tells. Myth is language, functioning
on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at ‘taking off’ from the linguistic ground on which it keeps on rolling.
(SA, p. 210)
Moreover, the ‘correspondence’ between a myth’s ‘meaning’ and its
‘content’ can also be of a complex linguistic order:
There must be, and there is, a correspondence between the
unconscious meaning of a myth – the probem it tries to solve – and
the conscious content it makes use of to reach that end, i.e. the plot.
However, this correspondence should not always be conceived as a
kind of mirror-image, it can also appear as a transformation.
(‘Four Winnebago Myths’ in Richard and Fernande de George (eds.),
The Structuralists, p. 201.)
Given this, Lévi-Strauss feels able to formulate two fundamental
propositions in respect of myth:
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structuralism and semiotics
1. The ‘meaning’ of mythology cannot reside in the isolated elements which constitute the myth, but must inhere in the way in which
those elements are combined, and must take account of the potential
for transformation that such a combination involves.
2. Language in myth exhibits specific properties, above the ordinary
linguistic level (SA, p. 210).
From these it follows, first, that myth, like the rest of language, is
made up of constituent units, and second, that these units presuppose
and will be analogous to the constituent units discernible in ordinary
language, in the form of phonemes, morphemes, etc. but will differ
from these in that they also ‘belong to a higher and more complex
order’ which entitles them to be called ‘gross constituent units’ or
‘mythemes’. By breaking down a large number of myths into the
smallest possible ‘units’ in the unfolding of its story, Lévi-Strauss discovers that although each unit consists of a ‘relation’ in which a certain
function is linked to a given subject (e.g. ‘Oedipus kills his father’), the
true ‘constituent units’ of a myth ‘are not the isolated relations themselves but bundles of such relations, and it is only as bundles that these
relations can be put to use and combined so as to produce a meaning’
(SA, p. 211). In short, like the phoneme in language, the ‘bundle’ is a
set of items sharing the same functional trait. That the true ‘mytheme’
is a ‘bundle’ of this sort is the source of the curious effects already
noticed in respect of myth: that however the myth is told, we sense,
behind the individual telling or parole, and behind the langue from which
that parole derives, a kind of super-langue, which emits a fundamental
message. Of course, the message is in ‘code’, and the ‘bundle’ shows
the code in operation.
A ‘bundle’ can best be defined as all the versions of a particular
‘relation’ that have ever existed, being simultaneously perceived, or
sensed beneath and through whichever particular version is being used
at any particular time. The ‘bundles’ function like phonemes, and their
effect ‘is as though a phoneme were always made up of all its variants’
(SA, p. 212).
What Lévi-Strauss is trying to capture here is the sense of interaction
between synchronic and diachronic dimensions, and between langue
and parole that the telling of, say, the Oedipus myth will always generate:
linguistics and anthropology
the sense, that is, that we are always in the presence of a totally realizable
potential; something that is more than a story being told here and now. A
myth truly always consists ‘of all its versions’ (SA, p. 217). He is suggesting, in one sense, that myth always works simultaneously on two axes,
rather as an orchestral score does, to achieve chording and harmony:
an orchestra score, to be meaningful, must be read diachronically
along one axis – that is, page after page, and from left to right – and
synchronically along the other axis, all the notes written vertically making up one gross constituent unit, that is, one bundle of relations.
(SA, p. 212)
Of course, when we hear any myth being told, we only ever encounter
the ‘orchestra score’ line by line, diachronically, and we infer (or
‘hear’) the resonances of each ‘bundle’ as we go along, just as, to take
another musical analogy, when we listen to a soloist in a jazz group we
(and he) infer from his solo performance the original sequence of
chords; the ‘tune’ from which it derives, and on which it contributes a
tonal commentary.
To illustrate his argument, Lévi-Strauss presents his controversial
‘decoding’ of the ‘score’ of the Oedipus myth. It is worth quoting in
full:
The myth will be treated as an orchestra score would be if it were
unwittingly considered as a unilinear series; our task is to re-establish
the correct arrangement. Say, for instance, we were confronted with a
sequence of the type: 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 1, 2, 5, 7, 3, 4,
5, 6, 8 . . ., the assignment being to put all the I’s together, all the 2’s,
the 3’s, etc.; the result is a chart:
1 2 4
7 8
2 3 4 6 8
1
4 5
7 8
1 2
5
7
3 4 5 6 8
We shall attempt to perform the same kind of operation on the
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32 structuralism and semiotics
Oedipus myth, trying out several arrangements of the mythemes until
we find one which is in harmony with the principles enumerated
above. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the best
arrangement is the following (although it might certainly be improved
with the help of a specialist in Greek mythology):
Cadmos seeks
his sister
Europa, ravished
by Zeus
Cadmos kills
the dragon
The Spartoi
kill one
another
Oedipus kills
his father,
Laios
Oedipus
marries his
mother,
Jocasta
Eteocles kills
his brother,
Polynices
Antigone
buries her
brother,
Polynices,
despite
prohibition
Labdacos (Laios’
father) = lame (?)
Laios (Oedipus’
father) = leftsided (?)
Oedipus kills
the Sphinx
Oedipus = swollenfoot (?)
linguistics and anthropology
We thus find ourselves confronted with four vertical columns, each
of which includes several relations belonging to the same bundle.
Were we to tell the myth, we would disregard the columns and read the
rows from left to right and from top to bottom. But if we want to
understand the myth, then we will have to disregard one half of the
diachronic dimension (top to bottom) and read from left to right,
column after column, each one being considered as a unit.
(SA, pp. 213–14)
It will be noticed that we are not concerned here to state the ‘true’ or
the ‘authentic’ or the ‘earliest’ version of the myth. That is a mistaken
quest, for if we genuinely define the myth as ‘consisting of all its
versions’ it will remain ‘the same’ as long as it is ‘fit’ to do so (SA, p.
217). We are concerned in fact with the langue of the myth that lies
behind all its paroles. Lévi-Strauss’s ‘reading’ of the above ‘mythemic’
structure is highly contentious, but it may reassure us to notice that it is
wholly in accord with Saussure’s insistence on language’s ‘dual’ aspect
(associative or ‘vertical’ and syntagmatic or ‘horizontal’) as well as, we
shall see later, with Jakobson’s recognition of language’s ‘metaphoric’
and ‘metonymic’ dimensions:
All the relations belonging to the same column exhibit one common
feature which it is our task to discover. For instance, all the events
grouped in the first column on the left have something to do with
blood relations which are over-emphasized, that is, are more intimate
than they should be. Let us say, then, that the first column has as its
common feature the overrating of blood relations. It is obvious that the
second column expresses the same thing, but inverted: underrating of
blood relations. The third column refers to monsters being slain. As to
the fourth, a few words of clarification are needed. The remarkable
connotation of the surnames in Oedipus’ father-line has often been
noticed. However, linguists usually disregard it, since to them the only
way to define the meaning of a term is to investigate all the contexts in
which it appears, and personal names, precisely because they are used
as such, are not accompanied by any context. With the method we
propose to follow the objection disappears, since the myth itself provides its own context. The significance is no longer to be sought in the
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eventual meaning of each name, but in the fact that all the names have
a common feature: All the hypothetical meanings (which may well
remain hypothetical) refer to difficulties in walking straight and standing
upright.
(SA, p. 215)
Accordingly, his conclusion as to the ‘fundamental meaning’ of the
Oedipus myth is quintessentially ‘structural’ in mode:
The myth has to do with the inability, for a culture which holds the
belief that mankind is autochthonous (see, for instance, Pausanias
VIII, xxix, 4: plants provide a model for humans), to find a satisfactory
transition between this theory and the knowledge that human beings
are actually born from the union of man and woman. Although the
problem obviously cannot be solved, the Oedipus myth provides a
kind of logical tool which relates the original problem – born from one
or born from two? – to the derivative problem: born from different or
born from the same? By a correlation of this type, the overrating of
blood relations is to the underrating of blood relations as the attempt
to escape autochthony is to the impossibility to succeed in it.
Although experience contradicts theory, social life validates cosmology
by its similarity of structure. Hence cosmology is true.
(SA, p. 216)
This means, I take it, that Lévi-Strauss believes he has arrived at a
method of analysis which furnishes ‘rules of transformation’ enabling
us to shift from one variant of the myth to another. In the process, a
mediating, validating, ‘true-making’ agency can be seen to operate
which overcomes ‘brute’ reality and transforms it into its own image.
Myth emerges as the ‘logical tool’ essential to this operation: one
whereby we, in society, ‘make up’ reality as we go along, resolve what
are in fact unresolvable ‘oppositions’, and so make our experiences
adequate to our theoretical presuppositions: ‘mythical thought always
progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution’
(SA, p. 224).
As a result, it is clear that analysis of this kind will quickly find itself
reaching to the level of those unconscious categories of thought which
linguistics and anthropology
underpin and formulate our total view of the world. The ‘logic’ of
mythical thought, which derives from those categories, will obviously not seem particularly closely related to what we think of as
‘ordinary’ (that is, Aristotelian) scientifically inclined logic. But, as
Lévi-Strauss concludes, ‘the kind of logic in mythical thought is as
rigorous as that of modern science and . . . the difference lies, not in
the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things
to which it is applied’ (SA, p. 230). Man ‘has always been thinking
equally well’ and his mind does not ‘progress’ so much as discover
new areas to which its ‘unchanged and unchanging powers’ may be
applied (SA, p. 230).
The ‘savage’ mind
When these conclusions are applied to so-called ‘primitive’ societies,
they obviously acquire disturbing implications for our own. We are
accustomed to think of such societies in negative terms:
Anthropology, we are apt to say . . . is concerned with societies that are
non-civilized, without a system of writing, and pre- or non-industrial in
type. Yet behind all these qualifying negative expressions there is a
positive reality. These societies are, to a far greater degree than others,
based on personal relationships, on concrete relations between
individuals . . .
. . . In this respect it is, rather, modern societies that should be defined
in negative terms. Our relations with one another are now only
occasionally and fragmentarily based upon global experience, the concrete ‘apprehension’ of one person by another. They are largely the
result of a process of indirect reconstruction, through written documents. We are no longer linked to our past by an oral tradition which
implies direct contact with others (storytellers, priests, wise men or
elders), but by books amassed in libraries, books from which we
endeavour – with extreme difficulty – to form a picture of their
authors. And we communicate with the immense majority of our
contemporaries by all kinds of intermediaries – written documents
or administrative machinery – which undoubtedly vastly extend our
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structuralism and semiotics
contacts but at the same time make those contacts somewhat
‘unauthentic’. This has become typical of the relationship between the
citizen and the public authorities.
We should like to avoid describing negatively the tremendous revolution brought about by the invention of writing. But it is essential to
realize that writing, while it conferred vast benefits on humanity, did in
fact deprive it of something fundamental.
(SA, pp. 365–6)
The impact of writing (and of reading) on the human response to
the world is clearly a matter of considerable interest to the student of
literature, and its implications will be taken up at some length later in
this book, when we consider the work of some of the ‘structuralist’
literary critics. For the moment, it will be sufficient to note that the
‘fundamental’ something that writing deprives us of is graphically
described by Lévi-Strauss in his work on the nature of the so-called
‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ mind. In one sense that something inheres in the
capacity of a man to invent totems: that is, to conceive of himself and his
social system, quite sanely, in terms of other species: to say, in short,
and with conviction, ‘I am a bear’, without thereby indicating his total
lack of what earlier anthropologists have narrowly thought of as ‘logic’.
In fact, that ‘something’ could be said to be the capacity for a different
kind of logic: a distinctive capacity to whose activities Lévi-Strauss
gives the name bricolage.
The term bricolage is defined in his two major works on the primitive
mind; Totemism (1962) and The Savage Mind (1962). It refers to the means
by which the non-literate, non-technical mind of so-called ‘primitive’
man responds to the world around him. The process involves a ‘science of the concrete’ (as opposed to our ‘civilized’ science of the
‘abstract’) which, far from lacking logic, in fact carefully and precisely
orders, classifies and arranges into structures the minutiae of the physical world in all their profusion by means of a ‘logic’ which is not our
own. The structures, ‘improvised’ or ‘made-up’ (these are rough translations of the process of bricoler) as ad hoc responses to an environment,
then serve to establish homologies and analogies between the ordering
of nature and that of society, and so satisfactorily ‘explain’ the world
and make it able to be lived in. The bricoleur constructs the totemic
linguistics and anthropology
‘messages’ whereby ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are caused to mirror each
other.1
A significant feature of bricolage is clearly the ease with which it
enables the non-civilized, non-literate bricoleur to establish satisfactory
analogical relationships between his own life and the life of nature
instantaneously and without puzzlement or hesitation. His ‘totemic’
logic is not only structured, but structuring: its use of myth enables it
to move effortlessly from one conceptual level to another:
The mythical system and the modes of representation it employs serve
to establish homologies between natural and social conditions or,
more accurately, it makes it possible to equate significant contrasts
found on different planes: the geographical, meteorological, zoological, botanical, technical, economic, social, ritual, religious and
philosophical.2
As a result, the ‘savage’, or better, the ‘multi-conscious’ mind, able and
willing to respond to an environment on more than one level simultaneously, and constructing in the process an elaborate and to us a
bewilderingly complex ‘world picture’,
builds mental structures which facilitate an understanding of the
world in as much as they resemble it. In this sense savage thought can
be defined as analogical thought.
(SM, p. 263)
What is involved here is a ‘reciprocity of perspectives’ in which man
and the world mirror each other by means of ‘classificatory systems’
which operate as ‘systems of meaning’ (SM, pp. 222–3). ‘Analogical
thought’ works by imposing on the world a series of structural ‘contrasts’ or ‘oppositions’ to which all the members of the culture tacitly
assent and then proposing that these oppositions are analogically
1
I have made the same point, with particular reference to the process of bricolage and the
work of Lévi-Strauss, in Metaphor (London: Methuen, 1972), pp. 83–4. There the material
forms part of a larger argument (pp. 78 ff.) concerning the relationship of language to
reality.
2
Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. 93. I shall hereafter refer to this work as SM.
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structuralism and semiotics
related in that their differences are felt to resemble each other. As a
result an analysis of the analogical relationship between the oppositions of ‘up’ and ‘down’, ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, ‘raw’ and ‘cooked’ will offer
insights into the nature of the particular ‘reality’ that each culture
perceives.
A good example is the opposition between ‘edible’ and ‘inedible’
which all cultures maintain. Obviously the nature of the items placed
under either of these two headings will crucially determine the way of
life involved, since what is at stake is assent to the same ‘ordering’ of
almost the entire natural world. ‘Analogical thought’ will move a culture to distinguish a ‘foreign’ culture from itself on this basis, so that
the opposition ‘edible–inedible’ will become analogically related to the
opposition ‘native–foreign’. This means that ‘transformations’ between
the two sets of ‘similar differences’ become possible: ‘that which is
inedible’ becomes a metaphor of ‘that which is foreign’. So, one of the
persistent English metaphors for the French occurs because frogs’ legs,
placed under the heading ‘edible’ in France, find themselves under the
heading ‘inedible’ in Britain. Moreover, the conventions which govern
the cooking of food at large, the types of foods that may be combined
and the kinds of food that may be eaten on various occasions turn out
to be complex, coded sets of relationships relative to each individual
culture, important as a major mediating factor between that culture
and the nature that confronts it, and obviously maintaining a patterned
set of analogies between other kinds of social relationships.
‘Concrete’ logic of this kind will, in its ‘totemic’ mode, see no
difficulty in postulating ‘a logical equivalence between a society of
natural species and a world of social groups’ (SM, p. 104). A man may
think of himself as a bear because the analogy this evokes ‘is not
between social groups and natural species, but between the differences
which manifest themselves on the level of groups on the one hand and
on that of species on the other’ (SM, p. 115). To say that clan A is
‘descended’ from the bear, and clan B from the eagle ‘is nothing more
than a concrete and abbreviated way of stating the relationship between
A and B as analogous to a relationship between species’.1 In other
1
Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham, with an Introduction by Roger C. Poole,
p. 100.
linguistics and anthropology
words, the man does not believe he is a bear, but the bear indicates his
standing and role in the community, analogously defined, as part of a
pattern of ‘oppositions’, against the standing of someone else. It represents just the sort of structure that we have seen, with Saussure, to be
characteristic of language: a homology between two ‘systems of differences’ (Totemism, p. 150). And it once again underlines the structuralist
insistence that the ‘phonemic’ relationship between entities is of more
importance than the entities themselves, and indeed ultimately determines their nature. Thus the totemic ‘code’ acts as a ‘linguistic’ means
of communication in the culture at large: it functions, as Roger C. Poole
puts it, as a mode of ‘discourse’, a way of getting ‘certain things said’
(Totemism, p. 38). So, if we can accept Lévi-Strauss’s argument that
. . . the operative value of the systems of naming and classifying
commonly called totemic derives from their formal character: they are
codes suitable for conveying messages which can be transposed into
other codes, and for expressing messages received by means of different codes in terms of their own system.
(SM, pp. 75–6)
– we can also accept Poole’s conclusion that ‘. . . the identification “I
am a bear”, which seemed to anthropologists of an earlier period to
outrage the most sacred canons of logic’ can now in fact be seen as ‘a
statement about the world, and about the individual’s place in it, in
relation to all other things and individuals in the world’ (Totemism, p.
61). In other words, the statement ‘I am a bear’ is not illogical: it
demonstrates the limits of our own particular kind of logic. It is a logic
which lacks the conceptual tool by whose means the world can be
encountered, not as another creature but, in a phrase whose implication
clearly confirms the active presence of a code, ‘by means of’ that
creature (SM, p. 149).
Anthropology is traditionally distinguished from history as the study
of societies which have no written documents (SA, pp. 24–5). But so
deeply does anthropology of the kind propounded by Lévi-Strauss
probe into the ‘encoding’ or structuring capacity of the human
mind, that one of its conclusions must be that it has encountered the
essential nature of that mind in its fundamental form, regardless of the
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particular society in which it appears. It is a form which does not
significantly vary in the case of the ‘modern’ technological mind however much that tends, misleadingly, to think of language, that formative, ‘unreflecting totalization’ of our experience, solely in its written
mode. That mind, which exists in us no less than in ‘primitive’ man,
proves to be a fundamentally ‘structuring’ agency of considerable
power. And it is worth pondering the evident fact that one of the
foremost manifestations of its structuring capacity, totemism, is not
simply something in which ‘savages’ engage. In British sporting circles,
a man may, however lamely, be called a ‘Lion’, a ‘Springbok’, a ‘Wallaby’ by means of a structured ‘oppositional’ system in respect of
international rugby football, which involves the use of animal characteristics related to so-called ‘national’ temperaments. And as Edmund
Leach points out
It is a fact of empirical observation that human beings everywhere
adopt ritual attitudes towards the animals and plants in their vicinity.
Consider, for example, the separate, and often bizarre, rules which
govern the behaviour of Englishmen towards the creatures which they
classify as (i) wild animals, (ii) foxes, (iii) game, (iv) farm animals, (v)
pets, (vi) vermin. Notice further that if we take the sequence of words;
(ia) strangers, (iia) enemies, (iiia) friends, (iva) neighbours, (va) companions, (via) criminals, the two sets of terms are in some degree
homologous.1
Only the advent of post-Renaissance rational humanism, the invention
of ‘Man’ as an entity separate from nature, concerned to operate logically on it, not co-operate analogically with it, conceals that from us.
For the student of literature, the implications of Lévi-Strauss’s sort of
‘structural’ anthropology and the structural linguistics from which it
derives, must be considerable. Primarily, the notions fundamental to
both disciplines provide a basis for, and so lend power to, the modern
attack on ‘realism’ or ‘naturalism’: the presupposition that a transparent ‘one-to-one’ correspondence exists between a work of art in
language, and the ‘reality’ or ‘nature’ to which that work of art is
1
Edmund Leach, Lévi-Strauss (London, Fontana, 1970), p. 40.
linguistics and anthropology
presupposed to ‘refer’. By its undermining of what Lévi-Strauss calls
‘sterile empiricism’, that is, the notion that the ‘real’ world consists of a
single undeniable reality which, in their ignorance or perversity, the
lesser ‘savage’ minds do not recognize, such anthropology opens the
door to the notion that all societies construct their own realities in
accordance with mental or psychological principles that determine
form and function, and that they then covertly project these upon
whatever the real world may in fact be. Its fundamental perception is
that this is what all societies do, not just ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ ones.
The ‘savage’ mind, it argues, is the quintessential human mind, operating in a mode that differs from that of the mind of ‘civilized’ man, but to
no different end. The nature of both minds remains, in the last analysis,
the same. As a result, this view enables us to see ‘civilized’ works of art
as, in great measure, linked with ‘primitive’ mythology in their concern to reinforce and uphold the same process: the construction of the
world they appear only to describe. That is, it reveals to us, particularly
in its account of the nature of myth, the confirming, supportive, problem-resolving nature of all art. It thus strengthens the notion that art
acts as a mediating, moulding force in society rather than as an agency
which merely reflects or records.
For instance, in Totemism, Lévi-Strauss draws a parallel between the
philosopher Bergson’s concepts of reality, and those ‘common to all
the Sioux, from the Osage in the south to the Dakota in the north,
according to which things and beings are nothing but materialized
forms of creative continuity’ (Totemism, p. 171). Reconcilement of perceived opposites has been seen to be the aim of myth and totemism: it
is of course also the aim of ‘philosophical’ thought. Both the philosopher’s thinking, and that of the Indian, manifested in totemic systems and myths, show the same desire, says Lévi-Strauss, ‘to apprehend
in a total fashion the two aspects of reality . . . continuous and discontinuous’.
It happens that, in respect of the literary movement called Symbolism,
reconcilement of the same ‘opposition’ with regard to time formed a
central preoccupation of poets such as T. S. Eliot. Eliot’s feeling that,
against our commitment to a notion of sequential, continuously flowing time, there needs to be set a contrary sense of suspended ‘discontinuous’ moments of time, which are both ‘in’ time and ‘outside’
it, receives a brilliant exposition in his Four Quartets:
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structuralism and semiotics
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time.
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
(Burnt Norton)
Lévi-Strauss’s arguments in no way ‘explain’ the character of Eliot’s
lines, but they do contribute an enlarging dimension to the form of the
thought that animates them. If Eliot’s contradictory senses of time are
strikingly similar (via the philosophy of Bergson, which influenced
him) to that of the Sioux nation (Lévi-Strauss quotes from a version of
the Indian source):
Everything as it moves, now and then, here and there, makes stops.
The bird as it flies stops in one place to make its nest, and in another
to rest in its flight. A man when he goes forth stops when he wills. So
the god has stopped . . .
(Totemism, p. 171)
– then what confronts us is rather more complex than the coincidental
‘sameness’ of the relevant structures. It involves at the very least a
resurrection in the sophisticated ‘civilized’ mind of the ‘savage’ desire
for a totemic reconciliation of the opposition between the ongoing
movement of time, and its ‘stopped’, ‘frozen’ or ‘timeless’ moments. It
is significant that where the ‘civilized’ mind aims to achieve this reconciliation through ‘art’ or ‘philosophy’, the ‘savage’ mind aims to
achieve it through myth. And we might even add that, in respect of his
covert link with the Sioux, the highly Europeanized Eliot remained
nevertheless more American than he, or we, had realized.
In short, it confirms that totemism, or ‘savage’ ways of thinking, far
from being the preserve, or the burden, of ‘primitive’ man, in fact lie
dormant in all men. The definitive shape of that universal ‘human
mind’ which locates itself in ‘savage’ as well as in ‘civilized’ carriers,
linguistics and anthropology
and is borne indiscriminately by all of us, regardless of time, place or
history, emerges clearly in its fictive acts, in its stories, its myths and, it
follows, in their ‘civilized’ counterparts: novels, plays and poems.
However apparently firmly rooted in a particular and concrete ‘present’
and an individual response to it each of these may be, they betray
beyond that immediate present and beyond that individual response,
the trans-historical and trans-personal imprint that marks them as
human constructs. The apparent immediacy and ‘concreteness’ of writing has always served to conceal this feature, and confirmation of its
existence is more readily available in different forms. As a result, both
music and mythology, as aural/oral, ‘nonliterate’ modes of art have the
status, in Lévi-Strauss’s later work, of highly efficient ‘machines for the
suppression of time’. That is, they function trans-historically as entities
whose non-discursive forms give information above and beyond any
discursive content. Indeed music (and perhaps myth) can perhaps be said
to consist entirely of form.
But what of literary art? Any view of novels, poems, and to a lesser
extent plays, which wishes to respond to them as ‘machines for the
suppression of time’ will ultimately have to concern itself with those
aspects of a work which, although rooted in time, have another, prior,
‘timeless’ level of existence.
Once again, the structuralist impulse can be seen to probe like an xray beyond apparently independently existing concrete objects, beyond
an ‘item-centred’ (or ‘phonetic’) world, into a ‘relational’ (or ‘phonemic’) one. With regard to literature this means, initially, pushing
beyond mere content into an area which we can loosely term that
of form.
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3
THE STRUCTURES OF
LITERATURE
W we turn our attention directly to literature, it is clear that a
concern with form must rank as one of the central ‘structuralist’ preoccupations, so that a school of literary criticism which claims to focus
attention pre-eminently upon form must consequently be of some
interest to us. When in 1965 Tzvetan Todorov published in Paris a
selection, translated into French, of the forty-year-old writings of a
group of Russian critics under the title of Théorie de la Littérature, it
attracted considerable notice and has since exerted a good deal of
influence. The critics involved had all been members of what was
known as the ‘Russian Formalist’ movement.
RUSSIAN FORMALISM: THE KNIGHT’S MOVE
The name itself was originally applied to a school of literary criticism
which flowered in Russia just before and during the 1920s and which
was suppressed for political reasons in 1930. Its most widely known
proponents were linguists and literary historians such as Boris Eichenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomasjevsky, Juri
Tynyanov, and its two major centres were the Moscow Linguistic Circle
(founded 1915), whose members were primarily linguists, and the
the structures of literature
Petrograd Society for the Study of Poetic Language (founded 1916)
whose members were primarily literary historians. In Russian, the initial letters of the latter society were combined in the acronym OPOYAZ,
which became the title given to the formalist movement at large. Early
statements of the formalist doctrine are to be found in the Petrograd
OPOYAZ symposium Studies in the Theory of Poetic Language (1916, enlarged
1917, and then published with new essays by Osip Brik, Eichenbaum
and Shklovsky as Poetics in 1919), and in Roman Jakobson’s Modern
Russian Poetry (1921).1
Early Formalism built on the groundwork of Symbolism, and of the
symbolist concern with form as a viable communicative instrument;
autonomous, self-expressive, able by extra-verbal rhythmic, associative
and connotative means to ‘stretch’ language beyond its normal ‘everyday’ range of meaning. These concerns engendered in criticism a preoccupation with the techniques by which literary language works, and
a concern to specify and differentiate these from the modes of ‘ordinary’ language. But, as Eichenbaum wrote, the formalists ‘entered the
fight against the symbolists in order to wrest poetics from their hands –
to free it from its ties with their subjective philosophical and aesthetic
theories, and to direct it towards the scientific investigation of facts’
(Lemon and Reis, p. 106).
Thus, while it was its opponents who called the OPOYAZ ‘formalists’
their declared concern with ‘objective facts’ moved them to prefer the
title ‘specifiers’, and to describe their pursuit as a ‘morphological
approach’ to literature.
As such terms suggest, their preoccupations shared a good deal of
common ground with those of the ‘structural’ linguists and, though
they could not have known it, with the ‘structural’ anthropologists of
the future. While their methods differed somewhat, their aims were
the same. The formalists felt themselves to be fundamentally concerned
1
This account of Formalism, like any other, is heavily indebted to the work of Victor
Erlich, particularly his definitive study Russian Formalism. See also his ‘Russian Formalism’,
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 34, No. 4, 1973, pp. 627–38. In addition see the commentary by Fredric Jameson, The Prison House of Language, pp. 43 ff.
The two most easily available collections of Russian Formalist criticism translated into
English are Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays and
Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (eds.), Readings in Russian Poetics.
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structuralism and semiotics
with literary structure: with the recognition, isolation and objective
description of the peculiarly literary nature and use of certain ‘phonemic’ devices in the literary work, and not with that work’s ‘phonetic’
content, its ‘message’, its ‘sources’, its ‘history’ or with its sociological,
biographical or psychological dimensions. Art, they argued, was
autonomous: a permanent, self-determining, continuous human activity which warranted nothing less than examination in and on its own
terms. In the words of Shklovsky, ‘Art was always free of life and its
colour never reflected the colour of the flag which waved over the
fortress of the city’ (Erlich, p. 77). And if art, and specifically literature,
was of this nature, then literary scholarship and criticism should be
seen as a distinct and unified intellectual activity, with its proper area of
operations clearly and unequivocally defined. In accordance with the
general and manifestly ‘structural’ principle proposed by Shklovsky
that ‘the forms of art are explainable by the laws of art’ (Lemon and
Reis, p. 57), that area was emphatically concerned with the ‘how’ of
literature, not the ‘what’: with the distinctive nature of the literary art
in general. To accept Shklovsky’s dictum that ‘By “works of art”, in the
narrow sense, we mean works created by special techniques designed
to make the works as obviously artistic as possible’ (Lemon and Reis,
p. 8), is also to accept Jakobson’s conclusion that ‘The subject of literary
scholarship is not literature in its totality but literariness (literaturnost)
i.e. that which makes of a given work a work of literature’ (Erlich,
p. 172).
It follows, of course, that those distinguishing structural features
would be found within the work itself, not in its author: in the poem,
not the poet. And since anything might serve as material for a poem,
their location is bound ultimately to be in the distinctive use of language involved, not in any particular topic or concern embodied in the
work. Poetry, the formalists insisted, was made out of words, not
‘poetic’ subjects.
This particular bearing threw emphasis not on the images poets used
– indeed the formalists insisted that figurative language, metaphors,
symbols, ‘visual pictures’, far from being prerequisites of poetry were
no less characteristic of ‘ordinary’ language – but on those features of
language that were precisely and solely necessary in order to cause
literary art to exist. If the ‘study of the laws of literary production’
the structures of literature
(Erlich, p. 81) was the main concern of the formalist, then in the
sphere of literary analysis his interest was likely to be not in the presence of images, but in the use to which these were put.
Indeed, images and all other purely literary devices such as phonetic
patterns, rhyme, rhythm, metre, the use of sound not to ‘represent’
sense, but as a meaningful element in its own right, were assigned by
Shklovsky to one central use: that of ‘making strange’ (ostranenie).
According to Shklovsky, the essential function of poetic art is to counteract the process of habituation encouraged by routine everyday
modes of perception. We very readily cease to ‘see’ the world we live
in, and become anaesthetized to its distinctive features. The aim of
poetry is to reverse that process, to defamiliarize that with which we are
overly familiar, to ‘creatively deform’ the usual, the normal, and so to
inculcate a new, childlike, non-jaded vision in us. The poet thus aims
to disrupt ‘stock responses’, and to generate a heightened awareness:
to restructure our ordinary perception of ‘reality’, so that we end by
seeing the world instead of numbly recognizing it: or at least so that we
end by designing a ‘new’ reality to replace the (no less fictional) one
which we have inherited and become accustomed to. In this, it is
worth noting, Russian Formalism pre-dates the Brechtian concept of
‘alienation’ (verfremdung) whereby the object of art is seen to be the
revolutionary goal of making the audience aware that the institutions
and social formulae which they inherit are not eternal and ‘natural’
but historical and man-made, and so capable of change through
human action.
‘Making strange’ ranks as a central preoccupation of formalism and a
good deal of the most valuable formalist analyses of literature consequently consist of an account of the various means whereby and
conditions in which ostranenie takes place. It follows that these also constitute an account of the structural means whereby and the conditions
in which ‘literariness’ may be recognized and distinguished from other
modes and manners of linguistic communication. For by comparison
with ‘ordinary’ language, literary language not only ‘makes’ strange, it
is strange.
The ways and means involved consist in practice of various devices
or techniques (priem) which act as the agencies of ‘literariness’, thus
constituting the basis of the literary art, the fundamental aim towards
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structuralism and semiotics
which all the elements of literature are organized, and the standard by
which they may be judged.
With regard to poetry, this immediately requires that poetic discourse be seen as fundamentally different in its modus operandi from
discourse of any other kind. In effect, it raises the activities of discourse
to a much higher degree than ‘normal’ language does. Its aim is not
simply practical, or cognitive, concerned to transmit information or to
formulate knowledge that lies beyond itself. Poetic language is deliberately self-conscious, self-aware. It emphasizes itself as a ‘medium’
over and above the ‘message’ it contains: it characteristically draws
attention to itself and systematically intensifies its own linguistic qualities. As a result, words in poetry have the status not simply of vehicles
for thoughts, but of objects in their own right, autonomous concrete
entities. In Saussure’s terms, then, they cease to be ‘signifiers’ and
become ‘signifieds’, and it is the poem’s alienating devices of rhythm,
rhyme, metre, etc. which enable this structural change to be achieved.
As Roman Jakobson puts it, in a statement for which, we shall see later,
there is considerable support in his own linguistic theory,
The distinctive feature of poetry lies in the fact that a word is perceived
as a word and not merely a proxy for the denoted object or an outburst
of an emotion, that words and their arrangement, their meaning, their
outward and inward form acquire weight and value of their own.
(cit. Erlich, p. 183)
However, later formalist theory realized that the ‘meaning’ habitually carried by words can never be fully separated from the words
themselves because no word has one ‘simple’ meaning. The ‘meaning’
of A is not simply A1 or A2 or A3, for A has a larger capacity to mean
which derives from its particular context or use. No word is ever really a
mere proxy for a denoted object. In fact, the transaction of ‘meaning’
has a complexity of dimensions which the ‘poetic’ use of language
further complicates. Poetry, in short, does not separate a word from its
meaning, so much as multiply – often bewilderingly – the range of
meanings available to it. Again, it raises the degree of normal linguistic
activity. A word’s ‘freedom’ from its habitual referent ultimately
invokes its potential freedom to combine with an enormous number of
the structures of literature
referents. In short, a ‘poetic’ use of a word makes ambiguity a notable
feature of its performance, and it is this that alters its structural role
from that of signifier to that of signified.
When the devices of versification, patterns of rhyme and rhythm are
also considered, it becomes clear that they too contribute inextricably
to the range of ‘meanings’ available, in ways that are determined both
externally, by convention, and internally, by the expectations aroused
by the poem itself. Thus the sum total of ‘devices’ employed in the
poem generate and so constitute its range of ‘meaning’. In the end, the
poem is its devices, it is its form.
Shklovsky goes on to apply the same notion, which admitedly works
well with the lyric, to the quite different structure of the novel. Where
the lyric is in a sense ‘static’ in respect of its object, instantaneous in its
impact and graspable as a single unity, the novel’s commitment to
narrative, to movement in and through time, makes it an essentially
dynamic and active entity. Shklovsky’s awareness of this, and his
attempts to deal with it, constitute one of the first attempts at a ‘poetics’
of fiction, and it is one which, as we shall see, has greatly influenced
subsequent structuralist criticism.
The focus, naturally enough, is on the nature of narrative. If the lyric
operates the process of ‘making strange’ on static objects and institutions in what, to use Saussure’s term, could be called an associative,
‘vertical’ mode, the overriding necessity of narrative in the novel forces
on it a mode appropriate to its investment in temporality: the syntagmatic, ‘horizontal’ mode. Because the novel concerns itself centrally
with sequence, with the continuous passage of time, it offers no other
pre-existing concrete material on which the process of defamiliarization is able to act. Moreover there are no laws governing the novel as a
form separable from its narrative content. Each novel is different, and
each invention of content ‘re-invents’ the form of the novel. The same
is not true of the short story, which can be reduced to laws. We can,
that is to say, identify the non-story, but not the non-novel (see Jameson, op. cit., p. 73 ff).
Shklovsky’s concern therefore focuses on that aspect of the novel’s
narrative structure in which the process of ‘making strange’ most
clearly manifests itself: the plot. He is careful to distinguish between
plot and ‘story’, and the distinction turns out to be one of his most
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structuralism and semiotics
fruitful notions. ‘Story’ is simply the basic succession of events, the raw
material which confronts the artist. Plot represents the distinctive way
in which the ‘story’ is made strange, creatively deformed and defamiliarized (Lemon and Reis, p. 25). So ‘plot’ can be seen to be as much an
organic element of form in the novel as rhyme or rhythm are in the
lyric, and it has a decisively formative role. In fact, the ‘hero’ of a story
can be said to be a function of the plot, and is created by it, just as
Hamlet, said Shklovsky, is ‘created by the technique of the stage’
(Erlich p. 241).
Shklovsky’s theories (expressed in On The Theory of Prose, Moscow,
1925 and 1929) lead ultimately to a series of prescriptions, chief
among which is a demand for the suppression of naturalistic ‘motivation’ in the novel (because it reinforces habitual perception in the
reader) and a consequent emphasis on literary self-consciousness and
self-reference (which ‘defamiliarizes’ our perception): in short, to a
demand for an artform pre-eminently aware of and sensitive to its own
communicative conventions. The archetype of this sort of novel is
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which Shklovsky feels able to call ‘the most
typical novel in world literature’ (Lemon and Reis, p. 57), since its
main concern is the business of story-telling. In Shklovsky’s terms, its
plot is about the transformation of its own story into its own plot: it is a
novel about itself (and so, in general, a predecessor of modern avantgarde writing).1
If the formalists can be seen ultimately to be arguing that everything
in a work of art is there primarily ‘to permit the work to come into
being in the first place’ then, as Fredric Jameson argues, we must accept
that this represents a ‘radical inversion of the priorities of the work of
art’ which constitutes nothing short of a ‘critical revolution’. For its
intent is ‘to suspend the commonsense view of the work of art as
mimesis (i.e. possessing content)’ and in its place to substitute a notion
of the complete dominance of form.2 Literature seen thus is intrinsically
literary: a self-sufficient entity, not a ‘window’ through which other
entities can be perceived. Content is a function of literary form, not
something separable from it, perceptible beyond it or through it.
1
2
Shklovsky’s essay on Tristram Shandy appears in Lemon and Reis, op. cit., pp. 25–57.
Jameson, op. cit., pp. 82–3.
the structures of literature
Indeed, a work only seems to have content: in reality ‘it speaks only of its
own coming into being, of its own construction’.1
There is obviously a good deal of truth in this argument, and its
manifest similarity to Saussure’s view of language as a self-contained,
self-justifying structure seems to confirm the central point. As Jameson
comments ‘. . . all literary works, at the same time that they speak the
language of reference, also emit a kind of lateral message about their
own process of formation. The event of the reading, in other words,
only partially obliterates that earlier event of the writing upon which,
as in a palimpsest, it is superposed.’2 However, there is also the question of degree. The process of ‘defamiliarization’ presupposes and
requires the existence of a body of ‘familiar’ material, which seems to
have ‘content’. If all literary works engage in defamiliarization all of the
time, the absence of a familiar norm or ‘control’ robs the process of
any distinction. It doesn’t work. A work of fiction can only speak
of its own coming into being against a background of speaking of
something else.
The full implications of this problem were perhaps best handled in
the work of V. I. Propp, whose Morphology of the Folktale remains one of the
major formalist contributions, and represents a further significant step
towards a ‘poetics’ appropriate to the art of fiction. Propp’s concern, in
fact, is exactly with the ‘norms’ by which narrative structures work, the
units of ‘content’ in which they seem to deal, and his attempt at a
taxonomy of these retains considerable structural value to the present
day, for, like the myth, the fairy tale3 ranks as an important prototype of
all narrative.
As such, in Propp’s analysis, the fairy tale is seen primarily to
embody a syntagmatic, ‘horizontal’ structuring, rather than the associative ‘vertical’ structuring represented by the lyric. Propp’s analysis, in
short, reinforces the view that narrative is fundamentally syntagmatic
in mode. But the major breakthrough represented in his work derives
1
Jameson, op. cit., p. 89.
Ibid., p. 89.
3
Propp’s concern is specifically with the fairy tale: the use of ‘folk-tale’ in the title of his
study arises from an ambiguity inherent in the word shazki which translators have been
unable to resolve. See V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, second
edition, revised and edited by Louis A. Wagner, p. ix.
2
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structuralism and semiotics
from his insistence that in the fairy tale the all-important and unifying
element is found, not on a quasi-‘phonetic’ level, within the ‘characters’ who appear in the story, but on a ‘phonemic’ level, in the
characters’ function; the part they play in the plot.
If by ‘function’ is understood ‘an act of a character defined from
the point of view of its significance for the course of the action’
(Propp, p. 21) then it is clear that Propp’s position is truly a structuralist one. His argument, based on exhaustive analysis of a large
number of tales, leads to the conclusion that the fairy tale characteristically ‘often attributes identical actions to various personages’
(Propp, p. 20). This makes possible an analysis of the tales according
to the various functions of their dramatis personae, and this indicates
that in fact, despite the surface profusion of detail, ‘the number of
functions is extremely small, whereas the number of personages is
extremely large’ (Propp, p. 20). Hence the phenomenon of
‘duplicity’ which Lévi-Strauss notes in the structures of myth, and its
curious effect on the language involved: the ‘two-fold quality of a
tale: its amazing multiformity, picturesqueness and colour, and on
the other hand its no less striking uniformity, its repetition’ (Propp,
pp. 20–1).
Analysis of these elements of uniformity and repetition leads Propp
to the conclusion that all fairy tales are structurally homogeneous, and
embody the following basic principles:
1
2
3
4
Functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale,
independently of how and by whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the fundamental components of a tale.
The number of functions known to the fairy tale is limited (Propp
lists and analyses each one: a total of thirty-one functions).1
The sequence of functions is always identical.
All fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure.
The thirty-one functions, Propp finds, are distributed among seven
‘spheres of action’ corresponding to their ‘respective performers’ as
follows:
1
Propp, pp. 26–63.
the structures of literature
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
the villain
the donor (provider)
the helper
the princess (a sought-for person) and her father
the dispatcher
the hero
the false hero.
In a specific fairy tale, one character may be involved in several spheres
of action, and several characters may be involved in the same sphere of
action. But the important thing to notice is that the number of spheres of
action occuring in the fairy tale is finite: we are dealing with discernible and repeated structures which, if they are characteristic of so deeply
rooted a form of narrative expression may, as we shall see, have
implications for all narrative.
A central tenet of formalism was that the vitality of the process of art
depended on its ‘devices’ being seen in action. And by ‘baring the
devices’, by calling attention to the ‘defamiliarizing’ techniques he is
himself drawing upon as he writes, the literary artist is able to gain
access to the major overriding device of all: the alienating sense of
being thereby made privy to the process by which art works. Thus
Tomashevsky cites the extent to which writers conceal or ‘bare’ their
devices as an index of style. There is a nineteenth-century style ‘distinguished by its attempt to conceal the device; all of its motivation
systems are designed to make the literary devices seem imperceptible,
to make them seem as natural as possible – that is, to develop the
literary material so that its development is unperceived’ (Lemon and
Reis, p. 94) – and there is also another style ‘an unrealistic style which
does not bother about concealing the devices and which frequently
tries to make them obvious, as when a writer interrupts a speech he is
reporting to say that he did not hear how it ended, only to go on and
report what he has no realistic way of knowing. In such a case, the
author has called attention to the device or – as they say – the technique
is ‘laid bare’. Pushkin, in the fourth chapter of Eugeny Onegin writes:
And here already sparkle the snows
And they spread among silver fields –
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structuralism and semiotics
(The reader waits for a rhyme like rose;
Let him take quickly what this poem yields)’.
(Ibid., p. 94)
In essence, this overriding device of alienation has one main purpose, to shock us out of the anaesthetic grip our language maintains on
our perceptions. As we have already seen, Saussure points out that
native speakers tend to assume a necessary ‘fitness’, an unquestionable
‘identity’ between signifier and signified, between the ‘sound image’
made by the word ‘tree’, and the concept of an actual tree. This
assumption is the basis of language’s anaesthetic function.
But, as Jakobson argues, the poet’s job – as one who works with
language in the way that a painter works with colour – requires him to
refuse to permit that anaesthetic to operate: ‘The function of poetry is
to point out that the sign is not identical with its referent’ (Erlich, p.
181). And so what is important in any poem is not the poet’s or the
reader’s attitude to reality, but the poet’s attitude towards language
which, when successfully communicated, ‘wakes up’ the reader, and
makes him see the structure of his language, and so that of his ‘world’,
anew.
Thus, for Jakobson and other formalists, the differentiating quality
of ‘literariness’ resides ultimately in the poet’s distinctive use of language. Poetic language, as we shall see when we consider Jakobson’s
linguistic theory, becomes a kind of specially intensified language in
which signifiers act as signifieds, and which operates through its own
internal laws, appropriate to and reflective of its own nature. The repetition of sound and rhythmic structures characteristic of poetry, and
embodied in conventionalized formulae such as rhyme, alliteration and
metre, have therefore no reference to a ‘reality’ beyond the poem, but
derive (as even onomatopoeia does) from conventions arising within the
particular language involved. They act as auxiliary devices signalling
the ‘organized character’ of poetic language (Erlich, p. 214).
Thus, formalists like Brik who were concerned to analyse such elements, treated the poem as an intrinsic and self-regulating structure in
which rhyme has a similar status to metaphor: it also ‘deforms and
modifies’ meaning, and brings potential, ‘lateral’ meanings into play.
Poetry seen thus becomes, according to Jakobson, a deliberate
the structures of literature
‘deformation’ of ordinary language: it is ‘organized violence committed on ordinary speech’ (Erlich, p. 219).
By extension, literature at large can be seen as a special kind of
activity: one which, albeit permanent, and wholly natural to the
human species, is nevertheless isolatable, separable from what goes on
beyond it, and thus, like language itself, perceivable as a structure, in
exactly the terms we have encountered earlier, advocated by Piaget:
whole, capable of transformation, self-regulating, autonomous and
internally coherent. And literary change can be seen, not as a response
to, or a by-product of social change, but as the unfolding of a selfgenerating and self-enclosed sequence of styles and genres, propelled
and furthered by internal exigencies.
And so a new ‘formalist’ version of literary history becomes possible, in which new forms or styles emerge in revolt against the old, but
not as their antithesis, so much as a reorganization, a regrouping, of
permanent elements. This is also part of the process of ostranenie: when
the ‘strange’ becomes itself habitual, it needs to be replaced.
In this process, parody has an important role to play, since it always
uses another literary work as background, ‘takes off’ from that by
laying bare its ‘devices’. As Erlich puts it ‘the obsolete device is not
thrown overboard, but repeated in a new incongruous context and
thus . . . made “perceptible” again’ (Erlich, p. 258). The process indicates literature’s permanent self-consciousness, and its continuous
need for self-appraisal and realignment. In fact, Shklovsky went so far
as to propound a ‘law’ purporting to account for the process of literary
realignment whose central principle was the ‘canonization of the junior branch’. In order to renew itself, he argued, literature periodically
redraws its own boundaries, so as to include from time to time
elements, motifs and devices regarded until then as ‘peripheral’ or
‘junior’ in relation to the ‘main stream’ of literary endeavour. Thus
sub-literary or ‘junior’ genres such as journalism, vaudeville, the
detective story, find aspects of themselves drawn into the ‘canon’ of
official literature.
In short, the ‘law’ implies that all art exists in a continuum, that
‘high’ art periodically shifts its boundaries within that continuum in
order to renew itself, and that the only constant in this process is the
sense which ‘literature’ must always manifest, of being ‘literary’. In
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structuralism and semiotics
other words, what defines literature in any age is its structural role: its
‘opposition’ to the non-literature of that age.
It is this notion of literature as a kind of langue, an autonomous,
internally coherent, self-limiting, self-regulating, self-justifying structure, which centrally animates formalist criticism and links it clearly
with ‘structural’ developments in linguistics and anthropology. The
individual work of art stands as a sort of parole in relation to its parent
langue, a relationship in which each illuminates and is illuminated by
the other. In short, conventionality, the operation of tacit unquestioned
structural ‘rules’, emerges as the animating principle of literary art.
Whether that art has pretensions towards ‘realism’ or not, it remains as
‘bound’ by conventions which act as rules as much as a game of chess
does. We have already noted Saussure’s analogy between chess and
language as autonomous ‘structures’. The peculiarities of the way in
which the knight is required to move in that game have nothing to do
with any ‘reality’ outside the game, and require no external validation.
The knight’s move can thus stand as an appropriate symbol for Formalism’s pervasive preoccupation: the relation of the rules, not to ‘reality’,
but to the game itself. It is thus fitting that one of Viktor Shklovsky’s
volumes should be called Xod Konja, or The Knight’s Move, and that in it he
should apologize for what Erlich calls the ‘tortuous quality’ of his
criticism with the following plea: ‘There are many reasons for the
oddity of the knight’s move, but the principal reason is the conventionality of art. I write about the conventions in art’ (Erlich, pp. 190–1).
EUROPEAN STRUCTURAL LINGUISTICS
The Russian political climate of the 1930s ultimately proved altogether
hostile to the formalist movement, and it was finally suppressed. However, by that time, some of its most important theoretical elements had
taken root and blossomed in the field of structural linguistics, which, as
we have already noticed above, was beginning to develop independently on both sides of the Atlantic.
Attention has already been drawn to the commitment of American
linguists to the construction of synchronic accounts of native Indian
languages, a commitment arising partly from their fear that to describe
these ‘exotic’ languages in terms of familiar Indo-European categories
the structures of literature
could have a distorting effect on them. And we have remarked that this
practice eventually led to the development of an inherently ‘structural’
view of language and culture whose major proponents, Boas, Sapir,
Whorf and later Bloomfield, produced influential work in the field of
what has come to be termed ‘descriptive linguistics’.
Meanwhile, in Europe, two significant centres of linguistic study had
developed following the death of Saussure, and they are both important
in respect of the growth and expansion of structuralism. These were
the Prague (or ‘functional’) school, represented most effectively by the
work of Nikolay Trubetskoy and the erstwhile formalist Roman Jakobson (both emigrés from Russia), and the Copenhagen (or ‘glossematic’) school, best represented by the work of Louis Hjelmslev. These
three varieties of linguistic study, descriptive, functional, glossematic constitute
the major ‘structuralist’ modes of linguistic analysis current in the
twentieth century.
Copenhagen structuralism manifested itself in the emphasis
Hjelmslev placed on the formal nature of all language: ‘it would seem to
be a generally valid thesis that for every process there is a corresponding
system by which the process can be analyzed and described by means of
a limited number of premises.’1 Accordingly, he set himself the task of
constructing a ‘calculus’ capable of providing the ‘tools for describing
or comprehending a given text and the language on which it is
constructed’.2
As for the Prague school, as Victor Erlich says, structuralism was
their ‘battle cry’. The most characteristic feature of their approach was
the combination of the central notion that language was to be seen as
an ultimately coherent structure, not as an aggregate of isolated
entities, with a recognition and analysis of the variety of ‘functions’
that it fulfils in society. Thus the cognitive or referential function of language operates when it is used for the transmission of information; the
expressive or emotive function is seen when language is used to indicate the
mood or attitude of the speaker, or the writer; the conative or injunctive
1
Louis Hjelmslev, Prologomena to a Theory of Language (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin, 1961), p. 9.
2
See B. Trnka and others, ‘Prague structural linguistics’ in Michael Lane, ed., Structuralism: a
reader, pp. 73–4.
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structuralism and semiotics
function is involved when it is used to influence the person to whom it
is addressed, and there are also phatic and metalingual functions. We shall
be looking at these again when we consider the work of Roman Jakobson more closely.
In respect of the literary use of language, the distinction between
cognitive and expressive functions was applied by the Prague school
linguists, as we shall see, to formulate the principle that language is
being used ‘poetically’ or ‘aesthetically’ when its expressive aspect is
dominant: that is, when its language deviates maximally from ‘normal’
usage, by means of devices which thrust the act of expression itself into
the foreground. As the Czech linguist Jan Mukařovský puts it, this act of
‘foregrounding’ (an English version of the term aktualisace) is crucial:
The function of poetic language consists in the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance . . . it is not used in the services of communication, but in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself.1
In other words, there can be said to exist a sixth, poetic or aesthetic
function of language which manifests itself in the form of an utterance,
not merely in the ‘meaning’ or ‘content’ of its separate words. The
interest in form implied by these functions enabled the Prague linguists
to salvage the healthy elements of the OPOYAZ doctrines and to promote Formalism in terms of what Erlich calls ‘the close co-operation of
linguistics and poetics’ (Erlich, p. 158).
That co-operation eventually pushed Formalism into the much
larger field of signification in general. For, seen through the eyes of the
‘functional’ linguist, ‘Everything in the work of art, and in its relation
to the outside world . . . can be discussed in terms of sign and meaning
. . . aesthetics can be regarded as a part of the modern science of signs’
(Mukařovský, cit. Erlich, p. 159). We shall be returning to the notion of
a larger ‘science of signs’ later, but it is important to notice now that, in
such a context, the ‘restricted’ formalist view of poetics can no longer
1
Jan Mukařovský, ‘Standard language and poetic language’ in A Prague School Reader on
Aesthetics, Literary Structure and Style selected and translated by Paul L. Garvin, Washington,
D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1964, pp. 43–4.
the structures of literature
be binding. If the ‘aesthetic’ aspect of language operates as a valid
function within a total system which includes all aspects of communication, then many of the formalist preoccupations with ‘literariness’
must become integrated into the larger concerns of structural linguistics. The crucial figure central to the Prague school’s efforts in this
sphere is undoubtedly that of Roman Jakobson.
ROMAN JAKOBSON
Jakobson’s approach to poetry is essentially that of the linguist, and
‘poetics’ for him forms part of the general field of linguistics. As a
formalist, one of his major interests lies of course in the attempt to give
an account of the poetic function of language, but this is pursued
under the larger umbrella of a comprehensive linguistic theory. To this
end, he postulates two general linguistic notions which help to focus
on the particular character of language when it is used poetically: the
notion of polarities, and the notion of equivalence.
Jakobson’s concept of ‘polarities’ in language derives from Saussure’s insight concerning the syntagmatic and associative planes of
linguistic performance, and it confirms the notion of the ‘sparking’
force of binary opposition even at that basic level. Writing in 1956
about the linguistic problems of the disorder called aphasia1 (loss or
impairment of the power to understand and to use speech), Jakobson
records his observation that the two major (and binarily opposed)
component disorders (‘similarity disorder’ and ‘contiguity disorder’)
seem to be strikingly related to the two basic rhetorical figures
metaphor and metonymy.
Both are figures of ‘equivalence’ in that they characteristically propose a different entity as having ‘equivalent’ status to the one that
forms the main subject of the figure. Thus, in the metaphor ‘the car
beetled along’, the movement of a beetle is proposed as ‘equivalent’ to
that of the car, and in the metonymic phrase ‘The White House considers a new policy’, a specific building is proposed as ‘equivalent’ to
the president of the United States. Broadly speaking, metaphor is based
on a proposed similarity or analogy between the literal subject (the
1
Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language, pp. 69–96.
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structuralism and semiotics
car’s movement) and its metaphorical substitute (the beetle’s movement), whereas metonymy is based on a proposed contiguous (or
‘sequential’) association between the literal subject (the president) and
its ‘adjacent’ replacement (where the president lives). Metaphor, to
apply Saussure’s concepts, is generally ‘associative’ in character and
exploits language’s ‘vertical’ relations, where metonymy is generally
‘syntagmatic’ in character, and exploits language’s ‘horizontal’
relations.
Jakobson sees metaphor and metonymy as the characteristic modes
of binarily opposed polarities which between them underpin the twofold process of selection and combination by which linguistic signs are
formed: ‘the given utterance (message) is a combination of constituent
parts (sentences, words, phonemes, etc.) selected from the repository of
all possible constituent parts (the code)’ (Fundamentals of Language, p. 75).
Thus messages are constructed, as Saussure said, by a combination of a
‘horizontal’ movement, which combines words together, and a ‘vertical’ movement, which selects the particular words from the available
inventory or ‘inner storehouse’ of the language. The combinative (or
syntagmatic) process manifests itself in contiguity (one word being
placed next to another) and its mode is metonymic. The selective (or
associative) process manifests itself in similarity (one word or concept
being ‘like’ another) and its mode is metaphoric. The ‘opposition’ of
metaphor and metonymy therefore may be said to represent in effect
the essence of the total opposition between the synchronic mode
of language (its immediate, coexistent, ‘vertical’ relationships) and
its diachronic mode (its sequential, successive, linearly progressive
relationships).
Jakobson’s study of aphasia makes the significant claim that in the
patient suffering from ‘similarity’ disorder, only the syntagmatic or combinative aspects of language seemed to be preserved, and there was a
consequent inability to deal in ‘associative’ relationships, such as ‘naming’, the use of synonyms, definitions – i.e. the raw material of metaphors. However, such patients employed metonymy widely: they would
substitute fork for knife, table for lamp, smoke for fire etc. Meanwhile, in
the patient suffering from ‘contiguity’ disorder, the reverse situation
pertained. The ‘syntactical rules organizing words into higher units are
lost’ (p. 85), and the patient’s speech was largely confined to the
the structures of literature
substitution of words by ‘similarities . . . of a metaphoric nature’ (p. 86).
Thus, it appears that ‘Metaphor is alien to the similarity disorder, and
metonymy to the contiguity disorder’ (p. 90). As a result it becomes
possible to propose that human language in fact does exist in terms of
the two fundamental dimensions suggested by Saussure and, moreover,
that these dimensions crystallize into the rhetorical devices on which
poetry characteristically and preeminently draws. The two axes may be
represented as follows:
Both metaphor and metonymy can be subdivided into other figures
(simile is a type of metaphor; synecdoche is a type of metonymy) but
the distinction between the two modes remains fundamental, because
it is a product of the fundamental modes of language itself: it is how
language works.
Jakobson’s most famous formulation on this basis is his definition of
the poetic function of language as one which draws on both the selective
and the combinative modes as a means for the promotion of equivalence:
‘The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis
of selection into the axis of combination.’1 This becomes the distinguishing ‘trademark’ of the ‘poetic’ use of language, as opposed to
any other use. When I say ‘my car beetles along’ I select ‘beetles’ from a
‘storehouse’ of possibilities which includes, say, ‘goes’, ‘hurries’,
‘scurries’ etc. and combine it with ‘car’ on the principle that this will
make the car’s movement and the insect’s movement equivalent. As
Jakobson puts it, ‘similarity superimposed on contiguity imparts to
poetry its thoroughgoing symbolic, multiplex, polysemantic essence
. . . Said more technically, anything sequent is a simile. In poetry where
1
Roman Jakobson, ‘Closing statement: linguistics and poetics’ in Thomas A. Sebeok, ed.,
Style in Language, p. 358.
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structuralism and semiotics
similarity is superinduced upon contiguity, any metonymy is slightly
metaphorical and any metaphor has a metonymical tint’.1
Jakobson is also prepared to consider a preference for one mode or
the other as a kind of rough and ready index of literary style:
The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of
romanticism and Symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but
it is still insufficiently realized that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the so-called ‘realistic’ trend . . .2
In fact, he argues that a universal ‘competition’ between both modes
will be manifested in any symbolic process or system of signs, be it
intrapersonal or social, and instances that of painting where it is possible to distinguish between Cubism as metonymic and Surrealism as
metaphoric in mode. Structuralist psycho-analysts such as Jacques
Lacan have even suggested that these two modes of symbolic representation provide a model for the understanding of psychic functions: the
concept of metaphor illuminates the notion of ‘symptom’ (the
replacing of one signifier by an associated one), that of metonymy
sheds light on the origin of desire (through the combinative connection of signifier to signifier and the sense this implies of the infinite
extension of such a process into uncharted areas).3
Jakobson’s ‘polarities’ thus seem to take us to the heart of the act of
signification itself and in so doing to suggest very important ways in
which modes of signification may be distinguished from each other.
True to his formalist background, his concern centres on the ways in
which poetry differs from prose, and in which ‘literariness’ in language marks itself as distinctive.
We have already noticed the argument of Jakobson’s fellow Prague
school critic Mukařovský with regard to ‘foregrounding’: that the
1
‘Closing statement’, op. cit., p. 370.
Fundamentals of Language, pp. 91–2.
3
See A. G. Wilden, The Language of the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), p. 114,
and Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language, p. 122. Cf. Jakobson’s remarks on Freud
and Frazer, Fundamentals of Language, p. 95.
2
the structures of literature
‘aesthetic’ use of language pushes into the foreground the ‘act
of expression’ itself. Jakobson offers the more refined proposal that
the metaphoric mode tends to be foregrounded in poetry, whereas the
metonymic mode tends to be foregrounded in prose. This makes the
operation of ‘equivalence’ of crucial importance to poetry, not only in
the area of analogy, but also in the area of ‘sound’; of those metrical,
rhythmic and phonic devices whose promotion of a sense of repeated
‘sameness’, of pattern, constitutes the raison d’être of verse:
The principle of similarity underlies poetry; the metrical parallelism of
lines, or the phonic equivalence of rhyming words prompts the question of semantic similarity and contrast . . . Prose, on the contrary, is
forwarded essentially by contiguity. Thus, for poetry, metaphor, and for
prose, metonymy is the line of least resistance . . .1
By the use of complex inter-relationships, by emphasizing resemblances and by promoting through repetition ‘equivalences’ or ‘parallelisms’ of sound, stress, image, rhyme, poetry patterns and ‘thickens’
language, ‘foregrounding’ its formal qualities, and consequently
‘backgrounding’ its capacity for sequential, discursive and referential
meaning. Words similar in sound are ‘drawn together in meaning’;
ambiguity is consequently favoured, and equivalence is promoted to
the status of a ‘constitutive device’ of the art. Poetry thus resides not in
the mere adornment of ‘ordinary’ language: it represents almost the
construction of a different kind of language: ‘poeticalness is not a supplementation of discourse with rhetorical adornment but a total
re-evaluation of the discourse and of all its components whatsoever’.2
It is worth stressing, however, that in Jakobson’s theory ‘poeticalness’ appears as an aspect of all uses of language and cannot simply be
confined to poetry. In short, the ‘poetic function’ forms part of the way
all language works, and is not just a special set of ‘tricks’ that poets
perform. Poetry only occurs, it follows, when ‘poeticalness’ is raised to
a higher degree than any of the other competing functions, although
they will obviously all continue to operate. Thus:
1
2
Fundamentals of Language, pp. 95–6.
‘Closing statement’, p. 377.
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structuralism and semiotics
Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art, but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it
acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent. This function, by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of
signs and objects. Hence, when dealing with poetic function, linguistics cannot limit itself to the field of poetry.1
Of course, we have methods of analyzing poetry which are more or less
satisfactory in that they can more or less deal with the metaphorical
nature of the material. But the analysis of prose is less well advanced:
. . . so-called realistic literature, intimately tied with the metonymic
principle, still defies interpretation, although the same linguistic
methodology, which poetics uses when analyzing the metaphorical
style of romantic poetry, is entirely applicable to the metonymical texture of realistic prose.2
What we need, Jakobson concludes, is therefore a poetics of both poetry
and prose which will attend to the differential, contrastive functioning
of metaphor and metonymy at all levels.
The notion of a ‘poetics’ for prose will recur in our account of
subsequent structuralist proposals for the analysis of fiction, but so far
never fully developed along the lines suggested by Jakobson. This perhaps comes about because although Jakobson appears to be offering a
method of analysis, in fact, as Jonathan Culler has suggested, his work
largely constitutes ‘a hypothesis about the conventions of poetry as an
institution, and in particular about the kind of attention to language
which poets and readers are allowed to assume’.3 That is, Jakobson is
talking about our response, as members of a community, to poetry and
to prose, rather than about poetry and prose per se.
Part of the difficulty lies of course in the fact that poetry and prose
do not exist per se. Their nature is determined by the conventional role
society gives to the particular uses of language in which they engage.
1
‘Closing statement’, p. 356.
‘Closing statement’, p. 375.
3
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. 69.
2
the structures of literature
Jakobson’s work on the nature of the communicative act, and on the
functions of the language involved has already been mentioned. His
account of the ‘poetic function’ has been of particular significance. It
confirms the insights already mentioned, and supplies the theoretical
basis for the final stage of the bridge which links Formalism and Structuralism in respect of literature.
Very briefly, Jakobson draws attention to the six constituent factors
that make up any speech event. These can be best understood by means
of his diagram1:
All communication consists of a message initiated by an addresser, whose
destination is an addressee. But the process is not as simple as that. The
message requires a contact between addresser and addressee, which may
be oral, visual, electronic or whatever. It must be formulated in terms
of a code: speech, numbers, writing, sound-formations etc. And the
message must refer to a context understood by both addresser and
addressee, which enables the message to ‘make sense’ – as (we hope)
the context of the present discussion enables individual phrases and
sentences to be meaningful where otherwise (uttered at, say, a football
match) they would not.
The central point to emerge from Jakobson’s account of communication is that the ‘message’ does not and cannot supply all of the
‘meaning’ of the transaction, and that a good deal of what is communicated derives from the context, the code, and the means of contact. ‘Meaning’ in short resides in the total act of communication, a
situation intensified by the fact that all languages contain grammatical
elements which have no precise meaning per se, and which are wholly
sensitive in this respect to the context in which they occur. That is, their
meaning is capable of considerable degrees of change, depending on
how they are used, and where they occur.
1
‘Closing statement’, p. 353.
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structuralism and semiotics
Such units are called ‘shifters’ and in English this refers to words
such as ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘me’ and so on. The actual person these words mean is of
course entirely dependent on the particular message which contains
them. They are totally context-sensitive, and ‘distinguished from all
other constituents of the linguistic code solely by their compulsory
reference to the given message’.1 What ‘shifters’ indicate, of course, is
the extent to which all meaning is context-sensitive, and the limited
access to so-called ‘General Meaning’ that any communication can
have. The importance of this (with particular reference to the use of the
‘shifting’ perspective involved in the personal pronoun) will be
emphasized when we consider some of the French structuralist
accounts of fictional prose, and in particular their attack on the idea of
an ‘un-shifting’ or ‘unitary’ meaning available to the reader. The
‘meaning’ offered by any use of language, as seen, say, by Roland
Barthes, not only characteristically ‘shifts’, but can (and should) be
‘shifted’.
‘Meaning’ then, according to Jakobson’s account, is not a stable,
predetermined entity which passes, untrammelled, from sender to
receiver. The very nature of language prohibits this, as does the fact that
the six elements involved in the transmission process are never in
perfect ‘balance’. One or other of them is always dominant to a greater
or lesser extent over the others. Thus, the communication may find
itself orientated towards the context in one situation, or the code in
another, or the contact in yet another, and so on.
True to the functional commitment of his Prague school background, Jakobson goes on to argue that each of the six elements
involved in the communication event has a distinct functional role. The
nature of the message is finally determined by the fact that it takes on
the functional character of whichever of the six elements involved
happens to be dominant. To understand this, we need to supply to the
above diagram of the speech event, the following additional functional
dimensions2:
1
Roman Jakobson, ‘Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb’ in Selected Writings
Vol. II, p. 132.
2
‘Closing statement’, p. 357.
the structures of literature
emotive
referential
poetic
phatic
metalingual
conative
This means that if the communication is orientated towards context,
then the referential function dominates, and this determines the general
character of a message such as ‘The distance from Cardiff to London is
one hundred and fifty miles’ which aims to refer to a context beyond
itself, and to convey concrete, objective information about that. This
seems to be the leading task of most messages, of course, but the matter
cannot simply be left there. For instance, if the communication is
orientated towards the addresser of the message, then the emotive function
dominates, and this arrangement would yield a message such as ‘London is a long way from home’ which aims to express the addresser’s
emotional response to a particular situation, rather than a purely referential description of it. Similarly, if the communication is angled
towards the receiver of the message, the addressee, then the conative (or
vocative, or imperative) function dominates, indicated by the use of
devices such as ‘Look!’ or ‘Listen!’ or ‘Now see here . . .’ or ‘I say . . .’.
If the communication inclines towards the contact, then the phatic function dominates (the purpose of this is to check that the contact is
working properly: in utterance it yields ‘phatic’ events such as ‘good
morning’, ‘how are you’ etc., whose purpose is not to elicit or offer
information, but to establish linguistic contact, or to ‘prime the pump’
of conversation: most British conversation about the weather has this
‘phatic’ function, rather than a meterological one). If towards the code,
then the metalingual function dominates (this is to check that the same
code is being used by both parties: in utterance this yields phrases such
as ‘understand?’, ‘see?’, ‘Get it?’, ‘O.K.?’). Finally, if the communication
is orientated towards the message for its own sake, then the poetic or
aesthetic function can be said to be dominant.
In this last instance, Jakobson’s comprehensive (and fundamentally
structural) view of the way language operates confirms and reinforces
that crucial insight into the nature of verbal art to which attention has
already been drawn in our assessment of his work as a formalist. For it
is of the distinctive essence of the aesthetic use of language, seen thus
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structuralism and semiotics
‘functionally’ and in relation to the totality of human communication,
that it is self-conscious; concerned above all to draw attention to its own
nature, its own sound-patterns, diction, syntax etc. and not to refer primarily to some ‘reality’ beyond itself. Language’s ‘poetic’ function, it
will be remembered, promotes ‘the palpability of signs’. As a result it
systematically undermines the sense of any ‘natural’ or ‘transparent’
connection between signifier and signified, sign and object. As Jakobson says, it ‘deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and
objects’.1 Verbal art, seen thus, is not referential in mode, and
does not function as a transparent ‘window’ through which the
reader encounters the poem’s or the novel’s ‘subject’. Its mode is
auto-referential; it is its own subject.
As we have already noted in respect of Formalism, and as we shall
certainly note again in respect of Structuralism as this is presented by
its French propounders, this view of literary art serves to reintegrate
form and content, and to present the work, not as the ‘container’ of a
message, but as an intrinsic, self-generating, self-regulating and ultimately self-regarding whole, needing no reference beyond its own
boundaries to validate its nature. It is, in short, in Piaget’s terms, a
structure. In its formulation of a comprehensive theory of language and
communication in which this notion of literature has an integral
part, Jakobson’s work emerges as the bridge linking Formalism and
Structuralism, and as the theoretical foundation of both.
In effect, Jakobson’s influence has been most strongly felt in the
efforts that have been made to apply structural linguistics to the analysis of poetry. But what of prose? Here the linking figure is probably that
of Propp, and his heirs are undoubtedly a large and expanding group of
French structuralist critics whose work has been given increasing currency in the last ten years. Of these, it seems helpful to look relatively
closely at three who may stand as representative of significant developments in the analysis of the structures of fiction, the ‘grammar’ of
plot, the devices which signal to us that we are in the presence of
narrative: the constituents, in short, of the elusive ‘poetics of prose’.
They can be termed ‘structuralist’ critics, not because they belong to
a particular ‘school’, but because the essence of their work derives
1
‘Closing statement’, p. 356.
the structures of literature
from the principle that literature offers the most obvious manifestation
of structuralism in action: that, as Roland Barthes puts it, ‘structuralism, itself developed from a linguistic model, finds in literature, which
is the work of language, an object that has much more than an affinity
with it: the two are homogenous’.1 And the questions they confront
are fundamental ones: how should we define narrative? what are the
basic units of fiction? how are these structured?
A. J. GREIMAS
A. J. Greimas is primarily interested in semantics, and his ‘structuralist’
approach to the matter of meaning has produced two influential books,
Sémantique Structurale, 1966, and Du Sens, 1970. In essence, his work
attempts to describe narrative structure in terms of an established linguistic model derived from the Saussurean notion of an underlying
langue or competence which generates a specific parole or performance,
as well as from Saussure’s and Jakobson’s concept of the fundamental
signifying role of binary opposition.
Just as the phonemic structure of a language rests on the principle
that a sound’s function is determined by what it is phonemically felt to
‘oppose’ as much as by what it actually, phonetically is, so our fundamental concepts of ‘meaning’ present themselves to us through the
opposition we feel to exist between basic ‘semes’ or semantic units.
Thus, ‘dark’ is defined principally by our sense of its opposition to
‘light’, and ‘up’ by our sense of its opposition to ‘down’. The same
binary patterning of mutual opposition manifests itself in concepts
such as male: female, vertical: horizontal, human: animal etc. As we
have seen, contrastive orderings of this sort form the basis of what
Lévi-Strauss has termed the ‘socio-logic’ of the human mind, which
structures nature in its own image, and thus establishes the foundation
for the systems of totemic ‘transformations’ that overtly or covertly
underpin our picture of the world.
In fact, Greimas argues, the perception of oppositions underlies
what he terms the ‘elementary structure of signification’ on which his
1
Roland Barthes, ‘Science versus literature’, The Times Literary Supplement, 28 September
1967.
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structuralism and semiotics
semantic theories rest. ‘We perceive differences’ he writes, ‘and thanks
to that perception, the world “takes shape” in front of us, and for our
purposes’ (Sémantique Structurale, p. 19). The differences we discern
between these basic ‘semes’ involve, at an elementary level, four terms,
seen as two opposed pairs, which our ‘structuring’ perception requires
us to recognize in the following form: A is opposed to B as – A is to – B.
In short, the ‘elementary structure’ involves recognition and distinction of two aspects of an entity: its opposite and its negation. We see B
as the opposite of A and – B as the opposite of – A, but we also see – A
as the negation of A and – B as the negation of B.1
The nature and power of these structures prove in effect so deep and
formative that they ultimately shape the elements of our language, its
syntax, and the experiences which these articulate in the form of narrative. In effect, Greimas argues, these binary oppositions form the basis
of a deep-lying ‘actantial model’ (modèle actantiel) from whose structure
the superficial surface structures of individual stories derive, and by
which they are generated. The parallel with Saussure’s notion of a
langue which underlies parole, and with Chomsky’s notion of a competence which precedes performance is clear. Man is the Talking Animal: he is homo loquens. So, the fundamental structures of his language
must inevitably inform and shape the fundamental structures of his
stories. And even though those stories seem different on the surface, a
‘structural’ analysis reveals that they spring from a common ‘grammar’
or (to use the term which Greimas employs to give the sense of the
model’s fundamentally dramatic, interlocutory nature) ‘enunciationspectacle’ (énoncé-spectacle): ‘the content of the actions changes all the
time, the actors vary, but the enunciation-spectacle remains always the
same, for its permanence is guaranteed by the fixed distribution of
the roles’.2
At the surface level, the structure of the enunciation-spectacle is
manifested through the various actants who embody it, as parole to its
langue. To modify the metaphor, these actants have a kind of phonemic,
rather than a phonetic role: they operate on the level of function, rather
1
Sémantique Structurale, pp. 18–29; Du Sens, pp. 135–55. See Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House
of Language, pp. 163–5 for an account and assessment of the intricacies involved.
2
Sémantique Structurale, p. 173.
the structures of literature
than content. That is, an actant may embody itself in a particular character (termed an acteur) or it may reside in the function of more than
one character in respect of their common role in the story’s underlying
‘oppositional’ structure. In short, the deep structure of the narrative
generates and defines its actants at a level beyond that of the story’s
surface content. As a result, as Jameson puts it, ‘it may turn out
that a character or actor in a given narrative in reality serves as a cover
for two separate and relatively independent actants; or that two
actors, independent personalities and separate characters in the storyline, amount to little more than alternating articulations of an actant
structurally identical in both contexts.’1
This is not an unfamiliar notion, of course, to Anglo-American criticism. A reasonably modern ‘thematic’ approach to Shakespeare’s plays
would have little difficulty, for instance, in accepting that in King Lear,
the separate ‘characters’ (acteurs) of Cordelia and The Fool in fact
embody the same ‘theme’ (intuitive innocence, set against Lear’s
rational corruption) and so function as the same actant. The account of
how Lear himself, by finally embracing their ‘foolish’ principles, also
becomes an aspect of the same actant, is of course the story of the play.
But Greimas’s quarry is not the elucidation of individual works of
literature, so much as the nature of the ‘grammar’ which generates
them. He begins, as we have seen, with the fundamental notion of
binary opposition as the basic human conceptual mode. A narrative
sequence embodies this mode by the employment of two actants
whose relationship must be either oppositional or its reverse; and on
the surface level this relationship will therefore generate fundamental
actions of disjunction and conjunction, separation and union, struggle
and reconciliation etc. The movement from one to the other, involving
the transfer on the surface of some entity – a quality, an object – from
one actant to the other, constitutes the essence of the narrative.
In so far as this sequence can be said to represent an enactment or,
as Greimas puts it, ‘an extrapolation’ of the fundamental structure
of syntax (subject–verb–object)2 it may be thought appropriate to
the primal ‘dramatic’ mode to which Man, as Talking Animal, is
1
2
Jameson, op. cit., p. 125.
Sémantique Structurale, p. 185.
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structuralism and semiotics
committed and in whose terms he conceives the world. This, in a
nutshell, is Greimas’s case: all narratives exemplify the fundamental
‘enunciation spectacle’ appropriate to homo loquens. And this means that
the semantic structure of sentences will imprint itself on much larger
entities. As Culler says, one of the chief functions of this scheme ‘is to
make the structure of the sentence roughly homologous to the “plot”
of a text’.1
Like Propp, therefore, Greimas argues for a ‘grammar’ of narrative in
which a finite number of elements, disposed in a finite number of
ways, will generate the structures that we recognize as stories. But,
unlike Propp, he sees the story as a semantic structure analogous to the
sentence and yielding itself to an appropriate kind of analysis. In pursuit of this aim, he proposes first an inventory of actants (derived in the
main from an amalgam of the work of Propp and another analyst
Souriau), and then three ‘actantial categories’; that is, three sets of
binary oppositions, into which all the actants can be fitted, and which
will generate all the actors of any story.2
Propp’s seven ‘spheres of action’, it will be remembered, were as
follows:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
villain
donor (provider)
helper
sought-for person and her father
dispatcher
hero
false hero.
By a reduction or regularization of these into three pairs of opposed
‘actants’, Greimas aims to emphasize, not the individual items, but the
structural relationship between them. His reorganization produces the
following categories:
1 Subject versus Object. This subsumes Propp’s categories of hero
1
Jonathan Culler, op. cit., p. 82. See also Roger Fowler’s extensive argument on this basis
in his Linguistics and the Novel (‘New Accents’, London: Methuen, 1977).
2
See Sémantique Structurale, pp. 175–80.
the structures of literature
(Subject) and sought-for person (Object), and characteristically generates stories of quest, or desire.
2 Sender (Destinateur) versus Receiver (Destinataire). This reveals, says
Greimas, the naiveté of some of Propp’s categories, for in them the
basic actant Sender turns out to be articulated in terms of two of its
acteurs. The first of these (the father) appears in category 4, confused
with the object of the quest or desire (the sought-for person), while
the second appears in category 5 (the dispatcher). In fact, both are
aspects of the single actant Sender in a category which characteristically
generates stories whose general bearing is that of ‘communication’.1
These two categories seem fundamental to Greimas, whether they
merge in one story involving just two acteurs, as in a banal love story
where the following structure pertains:
Him
Her
=
Subject and Receiver
Object and Sender
– or in a more complex narrative, such as the Quest for the Holy Grail,
where four acteurs are involved:
Hero
Holy Grail
Subject
Object
and
Sender
Receiver
God
2
Man
These two categories, it will be noted, offer an enactment of the ‘elementary structure’ of signification, A:B:: –A: –B, on which our humanity
rests, and thus fulfil Greimas’s requirement that, in order to have a
meaning, a narrative must form a signifying whole and ‘thus is organized as an elementary semantic structure’ (Du Sens, p. 187).
There is a third largely auxiliary category, in which the desire or
communication proposed in the other two is helped or hindered.
3 Helper (Adjuvant) versus Opponent (Opposant). It subsumes Propp’s
1
2
See the discussion, Sémantique Structurale, p. 178.
See Sémantique Structurale. pp. 177–8.
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structuralism and semiotics
categories 2 and 3 on the one hand (donor and helper) and 1 (villain)
on the other. Presumably Propp’s category 7 (false hero) also implies
the opposant function, though Greimas does not say so.
If these categories of actantial opposition can be said to represent
some sort of ‘phonemic’ level of analysis, then another level of ‘syntactic’ analysis is also required – one which will try to give an account
of the ways in which these elements may be joined together to form
narratives – in order that the ‘grammar’ be complete. Following the
lead given by Lévi-Strauss’s suggested modification of Propp,1 Greimas begins by pointing out that Propp’s thirty-one ‘functions’ may
also be considerably reduced, if one recognizes their potential for binary ‘oppositional’ combination or couplage.2 Thus, where Propp lists
‘prohibition’ and ‘violation’ as separate functions, Greimas combines
them into one: ‘prohibition versus violation’, on the grounds that the
terms presuppose each other: an act of violation requires a prior prohibition in order to define it. Once again, Greimas’s insistence on the
relationship between entities, rather than the entities themselves, marks
him as a structuralist, and his system of semantic analysis reminds us of
what might be thought of as the fundamental structuralist obligation:
the ‘obligation to articulate any apparently static free-standing concept
or term into that binary opposition which it structurally presupposes
and which forms the very basis for its intelligibility’.3
Thus, if we step slightly further back, the ‘prohibition-violation’
opposition can be seen to be part of a larger pattern of oppositions
within Greimas’s new ‘reduced’ inventory of twenty ‘functions’. One
of these refers to the function whereby the hero is commanded or enjoined
to do something or to go somewhere. Propp calls this a moment of
mediation, or a connective incident, and Greimas reduces this to a relationship
between mandement (mediation, enjoining, commanding) and acceptation
(acceptance of the command). If we now recall the model of the
‘elementary structure’ of signification, A:B:: –A: –B, it will be seen that
prohibition acts as the ‘negative transformation’ of command, just as
1
‘L’analyse morphologique des contes russes’, International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and
Poetics, Vol. 3, 1960, pp. 122–49.
2
Sémantique Structurale, p. 194.
3
Jameson, op. cit., p. 164.
the structures of literature
violation acts as the ‘negative transformation’ of acceptance on exactly
those lines. Seen thus, these four functions can be said to generate a
distinctive type of narrative structure which, at the deepest level, speaks
of matters of contractual obligation: i.e.,
if
then
command
acceptance
prohibition
violation
= establishment of contract
= breaking of contract1
Although Greimas makes no attempt at an exhaustive listing, he does,
by the means indicated, proceed to isolate various distinctive structures
(syntagmes) which, he claims, can be discerned in folk narrative:2
1
2
3
Contractual structures (syntagmes contractuels) in which the situation
has the overall bearing of the establishing and breaking of contracts, alienation and/or reintegration, etc., as outlined above.
Performative structures (syntagmes performanciels) involving trials,
struggles, the performance of tasks etc.
Disjunctive structures (syntagmes disjonctionnels) involving movement,
departure, arrival etc.
– and so on. It is impossible to give anything like the full details of
Greimas’s analysis, but enough has been presented to indicate the
method by which it proceeds.
He goes on, ultimately, to develop an analysis of the ‘semantic system’ of the novelist Georges Bernanos which sees his works as articulating from the ‘elementary structure of signification’ an entire ‘univers
Bernanosien’ whose fundamental symbolic conflict between life and
death derives, via various ‘transformations’ from the primary Axiologie
Joy
Ennui
1
—
Disgust 3
Suffering
Sémantique Structurale, pp. 195–6.
Du Sens, p. 191.
3
Sémantique Structurale, p. 256. Cf. Jameson’s application of a similar ‘elementary structure
of signification’ to Dickens’s Hard Times (op. cit., pp. 167 ff.).
2
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structuralism and semiotics
In essence, then, Greimas’s work in this area constitutes a development and refinement of Propp’s original insights, and his ultimate goal
is the same as Propp’s: the establishment of basic plot ‘paradigms’, and
an exploration of the full range of their combinatory potential: the
construction, in other words, of what the structuralists would call a
narrational combinatoire, or story-generating mechanism: a competence
of narrative, which generates the performance of stories; a langue, in
short, of literature.1
TZVETAN TODOROV
With the work of Tzvetan Todorov we shift from an emphasis on
literature as writing to an emphasis on the concomitant activity of
reading.
Like Greimas, Todorov begins with the notion that there exists, at a
deep level, a ‘grammar’ of narrative from which individual stories
ultimately derive. Indeed, there exists a ‘universal grammar’ which
underlies all languages. This universal grammar acts as ‘the source of all
universals and it defines for us even man himself’.2
In short, where Whorf, Sapir and others argued that the ‘shape’ of a
culture’s language imprinted itself firmly and radically on that culture’s
experience of the world, Todorov argues for a common human basis of
experience which goes beyond the limits of a particular language, and
which ultimately informs, not only all languages, but all signifying
systems:
Not only all languages, but also all signifying systems conform to the
same grammar. It is universal not only because it informs all the
languages of the universe, but because it coincides with the structure
of the universe itself.3
Of course, language is the primary signifying system among human
1
Greimas’s most recent work is Maupassant: la sémiotique du texte: exercises pratiques (Paris: Seuil,
1976). On the subject of poetics see his essay ‘Pour une théorie du discours poétique’ in
A. J. Greimas (ed.), Essais de Sémiotique Poétique (Paris: Larousse, 1971), pp. 6–24.
2
Tzvetan Todorov, Grammaire du Décaméron (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), p. 15.
3
Ibid.
the structures of literature
beings, and its ‘grammar’ is the determining one, the ‘model’ for all
other systems. So, since art constitutes another signifying system, then
‘we can be certain of discovering in it the imprint of the abstract forms
of language’.1 It follows that, as literature is the form of art which
derives most closely from language, the study of literature will enjoy a
privileged status for homo loquens, enabling us to cast new light on the
properties of language. Todorov tests this notion by attempting to
describe the ‘grammar’ of Boccaccio’s The Decameron.
It would be impossible to give a full account of Todorov’s ‘grammar’
here, but its most obvious characteristic is its sophistication of Propp’s
classifications. Initially, Todorov isolates three dimensions or ‘aspects’
of the narrative: its semantic aspect (i.e. its content); its syntactical aspect
(its combinations of various structural units); and its verbal aspect (its
manipulation of the particular words and phrases, ‘les phrases concrètes’, in which the story is told).2 Where Greimas’s concern was
mainly with semantics, Todorov’s is centred almost wholly upon syntax. His analysis of the syntax of the stories of The Decameron reveals two
fundamental units of structure: propositions and sequences.
Propositions are the basic elements of syntax. They consist of ‘irreducible’ actions which act as the fundamental units of the narrative: e.g.
‘X makes love to Y’. In practice such a unit may appear as a series of
related propositions, e.g. ‘X decides to leave home’; ‘X arrives at Y’s
house’ and so on (Grammaire du Décaméron pp. 19–20).
A sequence is a related collection or string (‘une certaine suite’) of
propositions capable of constituting a complete and independent story.
A story may contain many sequences: it must contain at least one
(Grammaire du Décaméron p. 20).
Todorov then proceeds to ‘x-ray’ the stories of The Decameron in these
terms, using the model suggested by grammar: that is, the units which
make up propositions and sequences are treated as parts of speech, while
the propositions and sequences themselves function as ‘sentences’ and
‘paragraphs’ which make up the whole of the récit or text. In this way,
1
Todorov, ‘Language and literature’ in Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., The
Structuralist Controversy, p. 125.
2
Grammaire du Décaméron, p. 18. Robert Scholes’s account of Todorov’s work (Structuralism in
Literature: an Introduction, pp. 111–17) is extremely helpful, and I have drawn upon it in what
follows.
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structuralism and semiotics
characters can be seen as nouns, their ‘attributes’ as adjectives and their
actions as verbs. ‘Rules’ can then be discerned which, operating on the
model of the rules of syntax in language, govern the formation of
propositions and sequences. In general terms, the whole text is seen, as
it is by Greimas, as a kind of sentence-structure writ large.
Thus, propositions are formed by the combination of a noun (character) with either an adjective (attribute) or a verb (action). In The Decameron
each character is wholly defined by the combination with attribute or
action (op. cit. pp. 27–30). All attributes are reducible to three ‘adjectival’
categories: states (états), interior properties (propriétés) and exterior conditions (statuts) (op. cit. pp. 30–4). All actions are reducible to three
‘verbs’: ‘to modify a situation’; ‘to transgress’; and ‘to punish’ (op. cit.
pp. 34–41). As a result, all propositions are committed to one of five
modes: the indicative mode (mode indicatif); the obligatory and the optative modes (modes de la volonté); and the conditional and the predictive
modes (modes de l’hypothèse) (op. cit. pp. 46–8).
There are three types of relation between propositions which characterize sequences: temporal relations, involving simple succession of time;
logical relations which deal in cause and effect; and spatial relations,
involving parallelism with multiple subdivisions (op. cit. pp. 19–20; 53–
60). These relations determine the structure of the sequences which
may then be classified as either (a) Attributive, i.e. stories which concern
themselves largely with the presentation of characters (histories d’attribut)
or (b) Retributive, i.e. stories involving ‘séquences de lois’, largely concerned with laws, the breaking of laws, and the punishment of lawbreakers (histoires de punition) (op. cit., pp. 60–4).
Finally, The Decameron manifests ambiguity at the level of both proposition (ambiguité propositionelle) and of sequence (ambiguité sequentielle) (op.
cit. pp. 64–8) as well as various types of combination of sequences such
as sequence A plus sequence B (enchaînement); A plus B plus A (enchâssement); or A plus B plus A plus B (alternance) (op. cit. pp. 68–71).
It must be remembered that Todorov is offering a ‘grammar’ on the
level of syntax only: its apparently ‘sterile’ nature comes precisely from
its lack of concern with ‘content’. In this, it has obvious parallels with
the grammars of languages proposed by structural linguists, in which
the question of ‘meaning’ had no immediate interest for the grammarian, and where the greatest crime was held to be that of ‘mixing levels’:
the structures of literature
of using the ‘level’ of meaning as the justification for a language’s
behaviour on the quite different level of its structure.
On the other hand, Todorov’s analysis does gesture in the direction
of a world beyond itself, which has had its shaping effect; the ‘real’
world of history and economics:
If the book has a general sense, it is certainly that of a liberation in
exchange – of a break with the old system in the name of audacious
personal initiative. In this sense, it would be quite reasonable to say
that Boccaccio is a defender of free enterprise and even, if you wish, of
nascent capitalism . . .
(Grammaire du Décaméron, p. 81)
The vagueness of such statements may be irritating, but they do indicate valuable areas for future research into the relationship between
narrative forms and historical exigencies.
Todorov’s ‘grammar’ of The Decameron is finally much more complex
than is suggested here and it yields a system of notation by whose
means the ‘structure’ of any particular story in the collection may be
recorded. It has one major advantage and one major disadvantage.
The disadvantage is obviously its complexity, deriving from its
inevitable emphasis on particular performance, rather than general
competence; on The Decameron itself rather than on the ‘rules of the
game’ which produced those stories, although this is certainly the
analyst’s ultimate quarry. The advantage must lie in the extent to which
such analysis loosens the anaesthetic grip that fiction has on us, as
members of a society committed for so long to ‘literary’ modes of
perception. It forces us to look again at stories, and to recognize them
for what they are: particular uses of language, or rather of that derivative of language, writing. The analysis of stories in the linguistic
‘grammatical’ mode proposed by Todorov, pushes their linguistic
nature into the foreground for the moment. And this has an effect well
described by Fredric Jameson:
The most characteristic feature of Structuralist criticism lies precisely
in a kind of transformation of form into content, in which the form
of Structuralist research (stories are organized like sentences, like
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structuralism and semiotics
linguistic enunciations) turns into a proposition about content: literary
works are about language, take the process of speech itself as their
essential subject matter.
(The Prison-House of Language, pp. 198–9)
The notion that literary works are ultimately about language, that
their medium is their message, is one of the most fruitful of structuralist ideas and we have already noticed its theoretical foundation in the
work of Jakobson. It validates the post-romantic sense that form and
content are one, because it postulates that form is content. At one level,
this permits, for instance, Todorov to argue that the ultimate subject of a
work like The Thousand and One Nights is the act of story-telling, of narration itself: that for the characters involved – indeed for homo loquens at
large – ‘narration equals life: the absence of narration death’,1 just as it
permits a similar argument in respect of the oral art of drama to be
made for the plays of Shakespeare.2 In fact, it finally permits Todorov
to postulate, like Jakobson, that all literary works are ultimately selfreflexive; about themselves:
Every work, every novel, tells through its fabric of events the story of its
own creation, its own history . . . the meaning of a work lies in its
telling itself, its speaking of its own existence.3
At another level, this notion finally validates Todorov’s own sense
(shared by Jakobson) that the study of literature will eventually serve to
illuminate the study of language.
If the structuralist approach to literature pushes its privileged ‘linguistic’ dimension into the foreground, it also raises two other connected matters: the relation of pieces of writing to other pieces of
writing (i.e. the question of genre) and the question of the relation of a
piece of writing to the nature of the act which it presupposes, and
which ‘completes’ it: the act of reading.
1
Grammaire du Décaméron, p. 92. Todorov uses récit here in the sense of ‘narration’. See the
whole section, ‘Les hommes-récits’, pp. 85–97.
2
See Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare’s Talking Animals (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), passim.
3
Littérature et signification, p. 49. Cf. Jameson’s discussion of this notion, op. cit., pp. 200–1.
the structures of literature
Todorov treats the question of genre in his Introduction à la littérature
fantastique. His fundamental argument claims that a ‘grammar’ of literary forms is as necessary as a ‘grammar’ of narrative itself. All writing
takes place in the light of other writing, and represents a response to
the ‘world’ of writing that pre-exists and therefore stands as the langue
to its parole. However, unlike other structures, the literary structure
permits the parole to modify the langue. As Todorov points out, the literary genre is not like the empirically observed generic ‘class’ of a science. Each new novel is not only generated by the pre-existing notion
of what a novel is, but it can also change that notion, and so itself
generate a modified one. The genre is therefore not altogether a
prescriptive concept.
Nevertheless, a world without a theory of genre is unthinkable, and
untrue to experience. We can tell the difference between a comedy and
a tragedy, even if those terms are not as precise and as exclusive as we
might wish them to be. Without such a theory, as Todorov says, ‘we
remain the prisoners of prejudices transmitted from century to century’. The distinction between the theoretical genre and the ‘historical’
or actual one, i.e. the one that emerges from the ‘fact’ of what is
written, is therefore dynamic, each having its effect on the other. The
definition of genres, Todorov concludes, cannot be fixed: it ‘is therefore a continual coming and going between the description of facts and
the abstraction of theory’.1
For instance, Todorov offers an account of the genre of the ‘fantastic’
(le fantastique) which describes it as bounded by the neighbouring
genres of the uncanny (l’étrange) and the marvellous (le merveilleux) but
never straying into either region, however much it may be drawn in
one direction or the other, and indeed however much it may embody the
tension that such a state creates.2 Thus the fantastic essentially manifests
itself in ambiguity, in the hesitation felt by someone who knows only
natural laws, when faced with an event which is apparently supernatural. Moreoever, the reader, integrated by the genre into the world
1
Introduction à la littérature fantastique, p. 26. See the discussion of genre by Scholes, op. cit., pp.
128–41.
2
Todorov, ‘The fantastic in fiction’, trans. Vivienne Mylne, in Twentieth Century Studies, Vol.
3, May 1970, pp. 76–92.
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82 structuralism and semiotics
of the characters, receives only that information which makes him
participate in the ambiguous nature of the situation. As a result, he
shares the protagonists’ hesitation when it comes to assigning events to
the real world or the world of the supernatural.
Thus the genre of the fantastic implies not only the narration of a
strange event, but also a certain way of reading it: one which will not
commit itself either to an allegorical reading of the events, or to any
other mode (e.g. the ‘poetical’) that would ‘normalize’ and so dispose
of them. So the hesitation between natural and supernatural which the
narration of the story requires, must be repeated in the responses of the
character the narration describes, and then echoed in the reader’s own
hesitation over the culturally available alternatives for his response.
At the end of the story the reader (but not the protagonist) is able to
resolve his hesitation by opting to classify the events of the story in one
or other of the neighbouring areas, the uncanny or the marvellous,
depending on the way in which he feels matters have been resolved,
and according to a ‘scale’ that Todorov ingeniously calibrates as
follows:
pure uncanny
fantasticuncanny
fantasticmarvellous
pure marvellous
Ultimately, Todorov argues, the role of the fantastic has always been
to set that which is ‘real’ (i.e. capable of natural explanation) against
that which is imaginary or supernatural. Hence it can only exist as a
genre in a society which articulates its own experience in terms of that
simple dichotomy. In setting the terms of the dichotomy in doubt (are
these events real or are they imaginary? How can we be sure?) the
literature of the fantastic may indeed have the role of ‘the uneasy conscience of the positivist nineteenth century’ – the period in which the
genre flourished. It suggests, in short, to that society, that life is not as
simple as it collectively makes out. And it follows that, in a period like
our own, which does not view the world in such simplistic terms, its
existence will be more difficult to establish and maintain. We no longer
believe in an external, objective, unchanging ‘reality’, nor in methods
which seek merely to transcribe it. For us, the concept of what is
the structures of literature
‘natural’ has been considerably stretched, so that we no longer believe
in an ‘imaginary’, supernatural world clearly opposed to the ‘real’ one
either. For us, ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ are not mutually exclusive categories: they partake of each other. In other words, we no longer believe in
the one orthodoxy that the genre of the fantastic exists to challenge: its
job is done.
Of course one of the most significant features of the nature of literature is the fact that the concept of genre is as useful to the consumer as
to the producer. In fact, as Jonathan Culler points out, the concept of
genre offers a ‘norm or expectation to guide the reader in his
encounter with the text’.1 A genre-word, ‘novel’, ‘poem’, ‘tragedy’
placed on the cover of a book ‘programmes’ our reading of it, reduces
its complexity, or rather gives it a knowable shape, enabling us literally
to ‘read’ it, by giving it a context and a framework which allows order
and complexity to appear. As Culler points out, we know that comedy
and tragedy exist, not because of any material difference in content – the
events of numerous fictions could fall into either (or both) categories –
but because they demand different readings – from us, and are ‘programmed’ to demand such readings and to yield themselves accordingly.
‘Comedy exists by virtue of the fact that to read something as a comedy
involves different expectations from reading something as a tragedy . . .’2
In short, to be successful, a theory of genres would have to give an
account of those elements of pre-supposition and expectation whose
role in the process of reading and writing enabled the reader to decode
literature in the same mode as it was encoded by the writer. Perhaps
‘decode’ is a misleading term here, for it suggests that there exists an
ultimately ‘uncoded’ message. This is not the case, for as we have seen
in the work of Whorf, Sapir and Lévi-Strauss, all our experience is
‘coded’ for us ultimately by our total way of life. A better term would
be ‘re-code’, by which is meant the activity of reducing or ‘trimming’
all experience to make it fit the categories we have ready for it.
Genres are the literary aspect of these categories. Their boundaries are
the boundaries of what Culler calls the ‘possibilities of meaning’3 of a
1
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. 136.
Op. cit., p. 137.
3
Op. cit., p. 137.
2
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text. And as Todorov’s example of the genre of the ‘fantastic’ shows,
each one can exist only when the society’s presuppositions, its culture,
has a place for it. Genres, then, are essentially culture-bound, ‘relative’
phenomena. To define genre in this way has the effect of distributing
emphasis more equally between the complementary acts of writing,
and of reading. As a result, reading becomes an aspect of the total
process by which we ‘enculturate’ all our experience, make it ‘natural’
and perceptible; make it capable of being experienced; make it, in short,
exist.
Todorov’s account of reading in Poétique de la Prose represents an
attempt to give prominence to an activity we tend to ignore. He points
out that one of the main reasons for this is that prevailing critical
orthodoxies either look through the text to something beyond it: the
author, or ‘society’; or they seek to explicate it by a process of commentary whose final term would be paraphrase – an evident circularity. In
place of these he recommends an approach to prose whose quarry is its
poetics: that is, the general principles which individual works embody in
themselves.
The approach which combines close concern for the individual
work with a larger awareness of the machinery of its poetics is what
Todorov terms reading. Reading sees the individual work as an autonomous system, but it eschews the ‘sticking-to-the-text’ aspect which
limits mere explication, because it is permanently aware of the text’s
status as a system and of its relation to a larger system. ‘Literary theory
(poetics) provides criticism with instruments; yet criticism does not
content itself with applying them in a servile fashion, but transforms
them through the contact with new material.’1
Hence the reader will not look for ‘hidden’ meanings, and give them
preference, as in the activity of interpretation; he will be concerned with
the relationship between the various levels of meaning, with the multiplicity which the text, as a system, enjoys. He will perform operations
such as ‘superposition’ and ‘figuration’ which see a text or group of
texts as obedient to the nature of a certain ‘figure’ or structure which
can be discerned in various modes and at various levels, so that a novel
1
Todorov, ‘The structural analysis of literature: the tales of Henry James’ in David Robey,
ed., Structuralism, an Introduction, p. 73.
the structures of literature
may in its plot and characterization enact the dominant ‘shape’ of a
particular figure of speech, or pattern of syntax. Such reading looks for
the ‘figure in the carpet’ beyond the overt content, and is well
exemplified in Todorov’s own reading of Henry James’s short stories,
where James, it is argued, ‘erects his method as a narrator into a philosophical concept’ so that the stories repeatedly evince ‘an essential
secret’ which itself gives rise to their essential organizing structure
‘based on the quest for an absolute and absent cause’. The secret turns
out to be the the existence of a secret, and the ‘figure in the carpet’
manifests a number of variations at a variety of levels, while never
losing its unifying identity. In short, the question of a ‘right’ reading
never arises. The critic concerns himself with what Scholes calls ‘readings that are more or less rich, strategies that are more or less
appropriate’.1
This means that:
1 Each literary text contains a potentiality for transforming the
whole system that it embodies and that has produced it: it does not
merely rehearse preordained categories and combine them in novel
ways. On the contrary, it modifies what it consists of.
2 The literary text is able to subvert the linguistic system it inherits:
it does not merely exhibit the characteristic forms of the language
which contains it, it also extends and modifies that language. After all,
writing, the raw material of reading, is not the same thing as language.
Thus ‘literature is, inside language, what destroys the metaphysics
inherent in every language. The essence of literary discourse is to go
beyond language (if not, it would have no raison d’être): literature is like a
deadly weapon with which language commits suicide’.2
It follows that:
3 The literary text is totally significant and signifying, and cannot be
‘reduced’ to our articulation of its ‘content’. Writing communicates in
ways in which language does not – e.g. in its ordering of events
through linear progression – and these need to be taken into account.
Writing does not simply contain.3
1
Scholes, op. cit., p. 145.
‘The fantastic in fiction’, op. cit., p. 91.
3
Cf. Poétique de la prose pp. 246–7.
2
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structuralism and semiotics
These ideas concerning the activity of reading perhaps represent
Todorov’s most seminal contribution to the structuralist view of literature. They are fully taken up by Roland Barthes, whose analysis of the
special nature of writing and reading has proved central to the development of structuralist literary criticism.
ROLAND BARTHES
The term ‘codes’ has already been used and it is appropriate now to
explore its implications a little further. The notion that we ‘encode’ our
experience of the world in order that we may experience it; that there
exists, in general, no pristine range of experiences open to us, comes
directly, as we have seen, from the work of Sapir, Whorf and LéviStrauss.
We thus invent the world we inhabit: we modify and reconstruct
what is given. It follows that, implicated as we all are in this gigantic,
covert, collaborative enterprise, none of us can claim access to
uncoded, ‘pure’ or objective experience of a ‘real’, permanently existing
world. None of us, in short, is innocent. It is necessary to raise these
rather general matters again, however briefly, before discussing the
work of Roland Barthes precisely because the totality of his work may
most fruitfully be seen as an attack on the presumption of innocence:
something which Barthes sees as a characteristic corruption of modern
bourgeois society.
The attack began in his first book, Le Degré Zéro de l’Écriture (1953)
(translated as Writing Degree Zero). Here Barthes focuses attention on the
classical French style of writing (écriture classique) as a phenomenon
which, established on a national scale in the mid-seventeenth century,
encounters a crisis of confidence in the mid-nineteenth century.
Not until then, he argues, did it become possible to discern that such
écriture was in fact a style at all: a particular, deliberately adopted ‘way’
of writing developed at a particular time and place. For the practitioners of the style had hitherto inculcated a sense of its inevitability; a
sense that such a way of writing was the only right or rational one. An
innocent reflection of reality, universally suitable for all times and
places, it seemed not really a style so much as the nature of writing
itself. Barthes sees this process as a characteristic act of bourgeois
the structures of literature
expropriation, part of a grand design whereby all aspects of bourgeois
life silently acquire the same air of naturalness, of rightness, of universality and inevitability. But bourgeois écriture is not innocent. It does not
simply reflect reality. In fact, it shapes reality in its own image, acting as
the institutionalized carrier, transmitter or encoder of the bourgeois
way of life and its values. To respond to such writing is to accede to
those values, to confirm and to reinforce the nature of that way of life.
When that way of life disintegrates, as it began to do in the midnineteenth century, then the style that supported it, and that it supported, will disintegrate also, and writers will either seek for a different
style or, recognizing the style as a style for the first time, will seek to
abandon style altogether.
Hence, since 1850, the stylistic phenomena recognized by literary
historians: the multiplication of various styles; the concept of style as a
painstakingly acquired ‘craftmanship’ (e.g. in Flaubert), the selfconsciousness about style, often resulting in a conglomerate style
which draws on, or scores off, others (e.g. Joyce, Eliot) and the various
efforts towards a ‘zero degree’ of style, a ‘style-less’, blank, transparent
way of writing (e.g. Camus, Hemingway). Of course, a style-less or
‘colourless’ way of writing ultimately proves impossible to achieve,
since it quickly becomes a noticeable style in itself. Hemingway’s pugnaciously non-literary manner is nothing if not distinctive, and socalled ‘realistic’ writing like Zola’s, ‘far from being neutral . . . is on the
contrary loaded with the most spectacular signs of fabrication’.1
Barthes’s major premiss as a structuralist critic is that writing is all
style, that ‘white writing’ does not and cannot exist; ‘writing is in no
way an instrument for communication, it is not an open route through
which there passes only the intention to speak.’2 Nor do any transhistorical, universal stylistic modes or conditions such as ‘precision’ or
‘clarity’ exist in contexts that are innocent of ideology: ‘In actual fact,
clarity is a purely rhetorical attribute, not a quality of language in
general which is possible at all times and in all places.’3 Indeed, Barthes would add, the notion that such things are intrinsic qualities of a
1
Writing Degree Zero, p. 74.
Ibid., p. 25.
3
Ibid., p. 64.
2
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certain kind of writing, and not features extrinsically determined in the
light of economic and political conditions, is an elaborate pretence. It
reveals the definitive historical commitment of an aggressive bourgeoisie, anxious to reduce all human experience to fit the shape of its
own particular view of the world, which it promotes as ‘natural’ and
‘normal’, refusing to recognize what it cannot so classify.1
In place of this deceitful process, Barthes offers the notion of literature as what Fredric Jameson calls a highly ‘conventionalized activity’.2
In it, the Saussurean signifier–signified relationship is complicated by
‘another type of signification which bears on the nature of the code
itself.’ In consequence, literature exhibits a fundamental duplicity:
it offers a meaning, and at the same time ‘wears a label’ to which it
points. In Jameson’s words, ‘each literary work, above and beyond
its own determinate content, also signifies literature in general . . .
identifies itself for us as a literary product’. That is, it announces that
we are in the presence of ‘literariness’ and so ‘involves us in that particular and historical social activity which is the consumption of
literature’.3
This can be done through its ‘tone’, its use of particular items of
vocabulary, its use, in the nineteenth-century novel, of particular stylistic devices such as the ‘narrative third person’ or the preterite tense:
Obsolete in spoken French, the preterite, which is the cornerstone of
Narration, always signifies the presence of Art; it is part of a ritual of
Letters. Its function is no longer that of a tense . . . it is the ideal
instrument for every construction of a world . . . Thanks to it, reality is
neither mysterious nor absurd; it is clear, almost familiar . . .4
These literary signs also act as indicators of social class, signalling –
indeed offering – membership of the bourgeoisie through their projection of the bourgeois world-view, and their presumption that such a
world-view is acceptable to that exclusive group of consumers who (in
1
Writing Degree Zero, pp. 61–7.
Jameson, op. cit., p. 154.
3
Jameson, op. cit., p. 155.
4
Ibid., pp. 36–7.
2
the structures of literature
a consumer-based society) ‘consume’ literature. This results in a
paradox to which bourgeois literary criticism is traditionally and systematically blind. As Jameson puts it, ‘At the same time that (literature)
poses its own universality, the very words it uses to do so signal their
complicity with that which makes universality unrealizable.’1
The transaction between writer and reader that ‘literature’ involves
can thus be said to be the opposite of innocent. In fact, it emerges as a
complex social, political, even economic affair and Barthes’s later theory has developed the notion that the process involves a no less complex
– even ornate – structure of codes. The codes act as agencies – whether
we are conscious of them or not – which modify, determine and, most
importantly, generate meaning in a manner far from innocent, far from
untrammelled, and very much closer to the complicated ways in which
language itself imposes its own mediating, shaping pattern on what we
like to think of as an objective world ‘out there’. As a result, any text will
reveal, when properly analysed, not a simple reflection of reality, but
the sort of multiplicity which Todorov recognizes as distinctive.
Possibly the best-known application of these ideas in early form
occurs in Barthes’s collection of demystifying essays, Mythologies (1957,
1970) where a remorseless analysis of the ‘myths’ generated by French
mass media lays bare their covert manipulation of the codes for their
own purposes. Despite the overt stance of the media, that no such
codes exist, that they innocently present the real world as it actually is,
Barthes’s analysis subtly and amusingly reveals a contrary aim: the
generation, confirmation and reinforcement of a particular view of the
world in which bourgeois values emerge, as usual, as inevitable and
‘right’ at all levels, whether in respect of the role of the writer in
society, the size of Einstein’s brain, or the nature and function of
detergents: ‘Products based on chlorine and ammonia are without
doubt the representatives of a kind of absolute fire, a saviour but a blind
one. Powders, on the contrary, are selective, they push, they drive dirt
through the texture of the object, their function is keeping public order
not making war.’2
1
Op. cit., p. 158.
Mythologies, p. 36. The theoretical conclusions of Barthes’s analysis in Mythologies make an
important contribution to the theory of semiotics, and are discussed below, pp. 106–9.
2
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structuralism and semiotics
A later instance of the critical application of the same method to one
of the pillars of what Barthes has called ‘this awe-inspiring mystery:
French literature’ occurs in his Sur Racine (1963) in which Racine’s plays
appear, not as the polished vehicles for a moral view of the world as
approved by the French literary establishment, but as the basis of a
‘Racinian anthropology’ whose complex, highly patterned system of
thematic ‘oppositions’, generates a variety of hitherto unheard-of (or
suppressed) pyschological structures. Such outrageous ‘desecration’,
undertaken in the name of literary criticism, provoked the scandalized
pamphlet of Professor Raymond Picard, Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture
(1965), to which Barthes replied in his Critique et vérité (1966), making
the point that while Picard’s own criticism naturally claims to be
‘innocent’, in fact it betrays a commitment to a particular, positivist,
bourgeois ideology. As an alternative, and in his own defence, Barthes
proclaims the virtues of a criticism which sets out to free itself from
such restrictions by means of its espousal of literature’s inherent ‘plurality’, its embracing of the literary text as, in Todorov’s terms, totally
significant and signifying, its commitment to ambiguity, its refusal to
give itself to a single vision, and its ultimate status as a ‘critique’ of
language.
The notions that plurality and ambiguity can be seen as virtues, not
vices of literature, and that a deliberately invoked tension between
meanings can reveal a good deal about the nature of language, are
perhaps not unfamiliar to English or American students of the subject
who have been exposed to the ideas of Richards, Empson, Leavis and
others. But Barthes’s ‘outlaw’ status confirms that they have tended to
order these things differently in France.
In fact, Barthes’s notions have an American flavour. Just as Whorf
and Sapir argue that the so-called objective world does not exist ‘out
there’, but is manufactured by us within and through our total pattern
of behaviour, so Barthes insists that literature has no single ‘natural’ or
‘objective’ standing beyond our own culture. Literature owes its existence to the codes that we invent to process the world and to create it. It
may be a distillation of those codes: that, in a sense, offers an excellent
reason for inventing it. It reminds the reader of the codes, and shows him
how they work. Its ‘critique’ of language consists in this.
The concept of literature’s ‘self-contained’ nature, its standing as a
the structures of literature
‘structure’ deriving from an interplay of codes, finds confirmation in
Barthes’s fundamental distinction between two sorts of writer and of
writing. We tend, mistakenly, he argues, to think of writing as instrumental, as a vehicle for an ulterior purpose, as a means to action or as
the ‘dress’ of language. Barthes points out that, although writing can
serve this purpose, it has acquired over the years another role. There do
indeed exist writers who write about other things, and for whom the
activity of writing is transitive, leading to other things. But there also
exists the writer for whom the verb ‘to write’ is intransitive; whose
central concern is not to take us ‘through’ his writing to a world
beyond it, but to produce Writing. He is an author: what Barthes terms
an écrivain. Unlike the writer (scripteur écrivant), who writes for an ulterior
purpose in a transitive mode, and who intends us to move from his
writing to the world beyond it, the écrivain has as his field ‘nothing but
writing itself, not as the pure “form” conceived by an aesthetic of art
for art’s sake but, much more radically, as the only area for the one
who writes.’1 Barthes is here clearly drawing to a certain extent on the
principles of Russian Formalism, and in particular on the distinction
made by Jakobson, between the ‘referential’ and the ‘aesthetic’ functions of language, assigning the former to the writer, the latter to the
author. Where the writer writes something, he continues, the author just
writes, that is all. He aims not to take us beyond his writing, but to draw our
attention to the activity itself. This constitutes, in one sense, a tautology in
that the raw material of the writer thereby becomes the end product of
his writing, but it is not unproductive. Barthes’s argument moves, in the
end, to embrace the full formalist position. Painters paint: they require us
to look at their use of colour, form, texture, not to look ‘through’ their
painting at something beyond it. By the same token, musicians present
us with sounds, not arguments or events. So, writers write; they offer us
writing as their art; not as a vehicle, but as an end in itself.
Of course, since writers use words, their art must in the end – as
Jakobson points out – be composed of signifiers without signifieds. So
it becomes essential that in order to appreciate the work of the écrivain
our attention should dwell on the signifiers and we should not yield to
1
Roland Barthes, ‘To write: an intransitive verb?’ in Macksey and Donato, eds, The
Structuralist Controversy, p. 144.
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our natural urge to move beyond them to the signifieds which they
imply. Much modern writing (e.g. Proust, Joyce, Becket) is clearly in
this mode, taking the activity of writing as its subject, and obviously
trying, by experimental methods, to establish a new ‘writerly’ status
for the writer. Such writing requires a new notion of the concomitant
activity of reading.
Like Todorov, Barthes could ultimately be said to centre his interest
on the reader and the act of reading, and it is in this area that he makes
his truly original contribution to the discussion which, as we have
seen, has its roots in the work of Saussure, the Russian formalists,
Jakobson and others. He even proposes a new taxonomy of literature
on this basis. In his critical tour de force, S/Z (1970), he argues that
literature may be divided into that which gives the reader a role, a
function, a contribution to make, and that which renders the reader
idle or redundant, ‘left with no more than the poor freedom either to
accept or reject the text’1 and which thereby reduces him to that apt
but impotent symbol of the bourgeois world, an inert consumer to the
author’s role as producer.
Literature of the second kind, which can only be read in the sense of
being ‘submitted to’, he terms readerly (lisible). In it, the passage from
signifier to signified is clear, well-worn, established and compulsory.
Literature of the first kind, which invites us self-consciously to read it,
to ‘join in’ and be aware of the interrelationship of the writing and
reading, and which accordingly offers us the joys of co-operation, coauthorship (and even, at its intensest moments, of copulation), he calls
writerly (scriptible). In that sort of writing (it is the sort that attracted the
attention and praise of the Russian formalists: we have already noted
their admiration of Sterne), the signifiers have free play; no automatic
reference to signifieds is encouraged or required.
Where readerly texts (usually classics) are static, virtually ‘read themselves’ and thus perpetuate an ‘established’ view of reality and an
‘establishment’ scheme of values, frozen in time, yet serving still as an
out-of-date model for our world, writerly texts require us to look at the
nature of language itself, not through it at a preordained ‘real world’.
1
Roland Barthes, S/Z, translated by Richard Miller, p. 4. All references are to this
translation.
the structures of literature
They thus involve us in the dangerous, exhilarating activity of creating
our world now, together with the author, as we go along. Where readerly
texts presuppose and depend upon the presumptions of innocence
outlined above, and with them the unquestioned relationship between
signifier and signified that those presumptions reinforce, saying ‘this is
what the world is like and always will be like’, writerly texts presume
nothing, admit no easy passage from signifier to signified, are open to
the ‘play’ of the codes that we use to determine them. In readerly texts
the signifiers march: in writerly texts they dance. And paradoxically,
where readerly texts (which require no real reading) are often what we
call ‘readable’, writerly texts (which demand strenuous reading) are
often called ‘unreadable’.
The experience offered by the reading of writerly texts has been
described by Barthes in his book Le Plaisir Du Texte (1975).1 It involves
two kinds of ‘pleasure’: plaisir (pleasure) and jouissance (bliss, ecstasy,
even sexual delight). Plaisir seems to come from the more straightforward processes of reading, jouissance from a sense of breakdown or
interruption: ‘Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment
gapes? . . . it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated,
which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles
of clothing . . .’2 Translated into literary terms this suggests that where
pleasure inheres in the overt linguistic ordering imposed by the ‘readerly’ text on its material, bliss comes about in ‘writerly’ texts, or at
climactic moments in ‘readerly’ ones, when that order breaks down,
when the ‘garment gapes’, when overt linguistic purpose is suddenly
subverted, and so ‘orgasmically’ transcended:
Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text
that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a
comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes
a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a
certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories,
brings to a crisis his relation with language.3
1
Translated by Richard Miller as The Pleasure of the Text.
The Pleasure of the Text, pp. 9–10.
3
Ibid., p. 14.
2
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Our creative responses to these latter texts or moments is what turns us
into ecstatic écrivains as we read.
Possibly the best way to an understanding of these matters is
through a consideration of Barthes’s analysis of the nature of the codes
involved in reading and writing, and of their potential for ecstasy. For
this, we must turn to S/Z.1
S/Z is the record of Barthes’s almost literally shattering analysis of
Sarrasine, a ‘readerly’ short story by the arch-realist French writer Balzac.
Barthes’s aim is to demonstrate the text’s totally signifying nature. His
method is to divide the story (or, in his words, to ‘separate’ it ‘in the
manner of a minor earthquake’, p. 13) into 561 lexias (reading-units
of considerably varying length) and then to analyse these ‘textual
signifiers’ in terms of five codes, as follows:
1 The hermeneutic code
This consists of ‘all the units whose function it is to articulate in various ways a question, its response, and the variety of chance events
which can either formulate the question or delay its answer; or even,
constitute an enigma and lead to its solution’ (p. 17). This is really the
‘story-telling’ code, by means of which the narrative raises questions,
creates suspense and mystery, before resolving these as it proceeds
along its course. Thus, the title of Balzac’s story offers a good example
of the hermeneutic code (it forces us to ask who?, what? immediately),
and the same code can be found in operation in lexias such as
‘Unfortunately, however, the mystery of the Lantys presented a continuing source of curiosity . . .’ which shows the ‘coding’ of a mystery
to which the reader naturally wants a solution, and which the story
obviously promises him. This code usually involves syntactic ordering,
vocabulary etc., and can be recognized by its general ‘shape’: a process
of mystifying together with the implicit promise of subsequent
demystification: the generation of suspense, to be followed by
disclosure.
1
For an excellent account of the full range of Barthes’s work, and a particularly good
exposition of the meaning of some of his more complex terms, I have found John
Sturrock’s article ‘Roland Barthes; a profile’, The New Review, Vol. I, No. 2, May 1974, pp.
13–21, very valuable.
the structures of literature
2 The code of semes or signifiers
This is a code of connotations which utilizes hints or ‘flickers of meaning’ (p. 19) generated by certain signifiers: e.g. again in the title of the
story, Sarrasine, the final ‘e’ of the name suggests femininity in this code
– a quality much at the centre of the story’s later complications – by a
simple lexical hint or flicker. Lexia (4): ‘Midnight had just sounded
from the clock of the Elysée-Bourbon’ manifests, in this code, an
encoded ‘flicker’ concerning ill-gotten wealth for, as Barthes says ‘a
neighbourhood of nouveaux riches, the Faubourg Saint-Honoré refers by
synecdoche to the Paris of the Bourbon Restoration, a mythic place of
sudden fortunes whose origins are suspect: where gold is produced
without an origin, diabolically (the symbolic definition of speculation)’ (p. 21). This code deals to a certain extent in what AngloAmerican criticism familiarly thinks of as ‘themes’ or ‘thematic
structures’.
3 The symbolic code
This is the code of recognizable ‘groupings’ or configurations, regularly repeated in various modes and by various means in the text,
which ultimately generates the dominant figure in the carpet. Thus, the
lexia (2) ‘I was deep in one of those daydreams . . .’ offers, in the
‘contrary’ or ‘antithetical’ nature of ‘day/dream’ the first instance of
what will grow into a vast central pattern of antitheses which the story
continuously generates, building up to its climax where the sexual
notion of ‘antithesis’ (male/female) enters the overall meaning of the
text. To Anglo-American eyes, of course, codes 2 and 3 are not easily
distinguished.
4 The proairetic code
This is the code of ‘actions’ (p. 18). Derived from the concept of
proairesis, ‘the ability rationally to determine the result of an action’, this
code is also embodied in sequences such as lexia (2) ‘I was deep in one
of those daydreams’, where the state of absorption indicated (‘I was
deep in . . .’) ‘already implies . . . some event which will bring it to an
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end’ (p. 18) – that is, a subsequent sequence along the lines of ‘. . .
when something happened to change that state’. Barthes’s account of
this code is notoriously lax, as he claims that since the proairetic
sequences are ‘never more than the result of an artifice of reading’, i.e.
we note or ‘record’ them as we go along, amassing the data provided
by the narrative, then their only definitive characteristic is the name we
give to each one: ‘strolling’ sequences, ‘murder’ sequences etc. So,
since ‘its basis is therefore more empirical than rational’, it is useless to
try to schematize it further (p. 19).
5 The ‘cultural’ code (or ‘reference’ code)
This code manifests itself as a ‘gnomic’, collective, anonymous and
authoritative voice which speaks for and about what it aims to establish
as ‘accepted’ knowledge or wisdom. Lexia (2) yet again contains a good
example in the phrase ‘one of those daydreams’, which refers to an
established body of what its author takes to be ‘common knowledge’,
made explicit in lexia (3) ‘which overtake even the shallowest of men,
in the midst of the most tumultuous parties’. The assumption that
‘everyone knows’ what the author means is clearly reinforced, and the
code’s function lies there: in the authentication by glancing or ‘knowing’ reference, of established and authoritative cultural forms. This is
the most controversial of the codes, and the least well-grounded, particularly as Barthes makes the initial and damaging admission that ‘of
course, all codes are cultural’ (p. 18) – a statement which, if true,
denies this code any specificity.
The exercise Barthes performs on Balzac’s short story has in essence
the effect of turning a ‘readerly’ text into a ‘writerly’ one. The five
codes are deployed intensively as disintegrating agents, often, as we
have seen, operating in the same lexias at the same time. The total effect
is to free the text from its ‘background’, its context, the limitations
imposed on its range by the traditions of historical scholarship and
criticism. However, the sheer bravura of the method used arouses certain suspicions. Barthes’s most outrageous piece of sleight-of-hand lies
in a sense in his presentation of the cultural code as simply one of a
range of five, thereby promoting the others (which could otherwise
easily be demoted to the status of mere aspects of a general cultural
the structures of literature
code) as free-wheeling agents, emitting signals of a distracting and
disruptive kind, over and above what the story appears to be saying.
Nevertheless (and this is undoubtedly the point of the exercise) the
arch-realist of French literature does not emerge unscathed. In fact he
turns out to be no ‘realist’ at all. His narrative affords no transparent
‘innocent’ window on to a ‘reality’ that lies ‘beyond’ the text. Rather,
the text reveals itself as closely akin in nature to the method of analysis
that has been applied to it: a minefield of concealed ‘shaping’ devices, a
corridor of distorting mirrors, a heavily stained glass window which
imposes its colours and its shapes definitively on what (if anything)
can be glimpsed through it. In fact most of what we see, Barthes seems
to say, is inscribed on the glass: we look at such a window, not through
it: it functions as a message, not a medium, and one not wholly in the
control of its author.
Barthes’s fundamental undermining of the idea that a text has a
unitary meaning injected into it by a unitary author constitutes of
course part of a larger attack on the illusions of individualism that
ultimately has a political and economic base. The ‘single vision’, the
reduction of the world to one dimension, the notion that human
beings are (or should be) separate entities, each metaphorically surrounded by an inviolable area of individuality, within which reside our
‘individual’ rights, our ‘individual’ psyche, our ‘individual’ personality
– these must rank as fairly recent, relatively modern notions. They are,
it may be argued, the product of two linked forces – protestantism and
capitalism – in which the individual’s personal relationship to God, and
his personal commitment to acquire and retain money spring from the
same impulse.
The twin notions of an author’s individuality and of his originality come
from the same source. Where modern (i.e. post-Renaissance) authors
tend more and more to think of their writing as an expression – even an
extension – of their individuality, medieval authors did not. Indeed,
the concept of personal ‘authorship’ (the author’s name on the book
he has written) has no real standing in the Middle Ages where works,
stories, poems, were more likely to be seen as part of a collective
enterprise, expressing no individual ‘point of view’ (the very phrase
suggests one man’s single vision) but a general outlook, the product of the
culture at large. The concept of plagiarism offers a notable instance:
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structuralism and semiotics
virtually unknown – because hardly to be conceived of – by that ‘collective’ medieval society, in a modern, individualistic, monocular society, it becomes the literary version of a crime against property: a kind
of theft.
In other words, Barthes’s objection to the apparently ‘innocent’ certainties of the connection between signifier and signified stands ultimately as an objection to an ‘individualized’ bourgeois social order
which rests on those certainties, which constructs its ‘reality’ on that
basis, and which accordingly finds itself committed – politically and
economically – to its maintenance and reinforcement. Such a social
order’s literary establishment – its critics – and that establishment’s
‘raw material’ – its texts – become a major tool in this process. The
institutionalizing of a particular vision of reality through the institutionalizing of a particular series of ‘classic’ texts and of appropriate
‘interpretations’ of them in an educational system which processes all
the members of the society, can clearly act as a potent ‘normalizing’
force. It is this force which S/Z aims to undermine, by showing first
that the text (and so all ‘realistic’ texts) does not offer an accurate
picture of an unchangingly ‘real’ world, and second, that a reading of it
is possible which can tear away the veil, reveal the signifier–signified
connection as the un-innocent convention (however politically bolstered)
it is, and offer a sense that reality remains genuinely ours to make and
to remake as we please. The pleasure of that making is creative in
nature, and perhaps jouissance is a good term for it.
Barthes has recently assigned to Japanese culture an ideal status as a
way of life in which signifiers have a higher status than signifieds. His
L’Empire des Signes (1970) applauds the absence of an ‘inner’ reality
prized higher than the outward sign which ‘represents’ it in that culture, for it releases its members from the duplicity of the Western signifier–signified articulation. But the West, it should be said, has its
modes of jouissance too. We have already noticed the connection between
Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the activities of the ‘savage’ bricoleur, and the
modus operandi of the jazz musician. The role Barthes gives the critic could
also be said to rank him with the jazz musician, as an artist whose art
derives from ‘given’ material, ‘given’ signifiers (a text, a chordsequence) but which creates, from these, new signifieds, a new reality
which is not given, and which surpasses the original in invention and
the structures of literature
beauty. This art – an art of signifiers, not signifieds, can be said to be
truly modern, whether its modernity manifests itself in jouissance or jazz
(and leaving aside the question of a philological or semantic connection between the two terms). It is also truly revolutionary, a term that
can with justification be applied to S/Z.
We have already noticed that concern with signifiers on a semantic
level forms a central feature of the work of A. J. Greimas, who sees the
signifier–signified connection as, in the long run, infinitely regressive
in nature. The connection itself is what generates meaning, not any
‘real’ world beyond it to which it refers:
Signification is thus nothing but such transposition from one level of
language to another, from one language to a different language, and
meaning is nothing but the possibility of such transcoding.1
The notion that meaning arises from the interplay of signs, that the
world we inhabit is not one of ‘facts’ but of signs about facts which we
encode and decode ceaselessly from system to system also stands, of
course, as a central theme of S/Z. It derives from Barthes’s earlier
interests in the pervasiveness of coding in all human affairs (e.g. food,
clothing)2 and its role as the distinctive human activity. We live in a
world, the argument concludes, which has no ‘pure’, no ‘innocent’
contexts to offer us: a world of signs about, rather than experience of. It
follows that structuralism’s final inclination must be towards a science
appropriate to the analysis of such a world.
1
A. J. Greimas, Du Sens, p. 13.
See Barthes’s ‘Eléments de sémiologie’ in Communications, Vol. 4, 1964, pp. 91–135,
published as Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, and his Système de
la mode.
2
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4
A SCIENCE OF SIGNS
A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it
would be a part of social psychology and consequently of general
psychology; I shall call it semiology (from the Greek sēmeîon ‘sign’).
Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern
them. Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it
would be; but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance.
Linguistics is only a part of the general science of semiology; the laws
discovered by semiology will be applicable to linguistics, and the latter
will circumscribe a well-defined area within the mass of anthropological facts.
(Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 16)
Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe I have shown, only another
name for semiotic, the quasi-necessary, or formal doctrine of signs. By
describing the doctrine as ‘quasi-necessary’, or formal, I mean that we
observe the characters of such signs as we know, and from such an
observation, by a process which I will not object to naming Abstraction, we are led to statements, eminently fallible, and therefore in one
sense by no means necessary, as to what must be the characters of all
signs used by a ‘scientific’ intelligence, that is to say by an intelligence
capable of learning by experience.
(C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. 2, Para. 227)
a science of signs
The notion of a ‘science of signs’, conceived independently and (as we
have noticed in the case of a number of linguistic concepts) at about
the same time by theorists on opposite sides of the Atlantic, has
become one of the most fruitful concepts deriving from the general
structuralist enterprise of the last two decades, and not easily distinguishable from it. The terms semiology and semiotics are both used to
refer to this science, the only difference between them being that semiology is preferred by Europeans, out of deference to Saussure’s coinage
of the term, and semiotics tends to be preferred by English speakers, out
of deference to the American Peirce.1 The field of semiotics is of course
enormous, ranging from the study of the communicative behaviour of
animals (zoosemiotics) to the analysis of such signifying systems as
human bodily communication (kinesics and proxemics), olfactory signs
(the ‘code of scents’), aesthetic theory, and rhetoric.2 By and large, its
boundaries (if it has any) are coterminous with those of structuralism:
the interests of the two spheres are not fundamentally separate and, in
the long run, both ought properly to be included within the province
of a third, embracing discipline called, simply, communication. In such a
context, structuralism itself would probably emerge as a method of
analysis linking the fields of linguistics, anthropology and semiotics.3 I
shall therefore attempt only the briefest outline of semiotics here
before narrowing the discussion to a consideration of some of its
implications for the student of literature.
It has already been argued that in human societies, language clearly
plays a commanding role and is generally taken to be the predominant
means of communication. But it is also clear that human beings communicate by nonverbal means and in ways which must consequently
be said to be either non-linguistic (although the mode of language
remains formative and dominant) or which must have the effect of
‘stretching’ our concept of language until it includes non-verbal areas.
In fact, such ‘stretching’ is precisely the great achievement of semiotics.
‘What semiotics has discovered,’ says Julia Kristeva, ‘. . . is that the law
1
See the excellent account by Pierre Guiraud, Semiology, pp. 1–4.
See the rather daunting survey by Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, pp. 9–14.
3
Cf. Barthes’s proposal to invert Saussure’s hierarchy and to nominate semiotics as part
of linguistics, Elements of Semiology, p. 11.
2
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102 structuralism and semiotics
governing or, if one prefers, the major constraint affecting any social practice lies in the fact that it signifies; i.e., that it is articulated like a
language.’1 In other words, nobody just talks. Every speech-act includes
the transmission of messages through the ‘languages’ of gesture, posture, clothing, hairstyle, perfume, accent, social context etc. over and
above, under and beneath, even at cross-purposes with what words
actually say. And even when we are not speaking or being spoken to,
messages from other ‘languages’ crowd in upon us: horns hoot, lights
flash, laws restrain, hoardings proclaim, smells attract or repel, tastes
delight or disgust, even the ‘feel’ of objects systematically communicates something meaningful to us. Man’s role in the world, such a
situation suggests, is quintessentially one of communication. He is, as
Greimas argues, a receiver and sender of messages: he gathers and
disseminates information. In Sapir’s words, ‘every cultural pattern and
every single act of social behaviour involves communication in either
an explicit or implicit sense’.2
Roman Jakobson suggests an approach to this mass of sign-systems
which begins by considering some general principles:
Every message is made of signs; correspondingly, the science of signs
termed semiotic deals with those general principles which underlie the
structure of all signs whatever, and with the character of their utilization within messages, as well as with the specifics of the various sign
systems, and of the diverse messages using those different kinds of
signs.
(‘Language in relation to other communication systems’
Selecting Writings Vol. II, p. 698)
The study of sign systems derives, Jakobson goes on, from an initial
and very ancient perception that a sign has two aspects: ‘an immediately perceptible signans and an inferable, apprehensible signatum’ (Ibid.,
p. 699). This does not essentially differ from the distinction between
signifier and signified recorded by Saussure: both elements function as
1
Julia Kristeva, ‘The system and the speaking subject’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 October
1973, p. 1249.
2
Selected Writings in Language, Culture, and Personality, p. 104.
a science of signs
aspects of the ‘indissoluble unity’ of the sign, and the various relationships possible between them form the basis of semiotic structures.
In fact the American founder of semiotics, the philosopher C. S.
Peirce (1839–1914), proposed a complex classification of signs precisely in terms of the different relationship each manifested between
signans and signatum, or signifier and signified. In doing so, he argued
that he was confronting nothing less than foundations of logic itself.
For in Peirce’s view, logic exists independently of both reasoning
and fact. Its fundamental principles are not axioms but ‘definitions and
divisions’ (Collected Papers, Vol. 3, para. 149) and these derive ultimately
from the nature and functions of signs.1 As a result, logic can be seen as
‘the science of the general necessary laws of signs’ (ibid., Vol. 2, para.
227). Logic, that is, is the science of signs.
A sign or representamen is ‘something which stands to somebody for
something in some respect or capacity’ (ibid., Vol. 2, para. 228): it is
‘anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to
an object to which itself refers (its object)’ (ibid., Vol. 2, para. 303). A
sign thus stands for something (its object); it stands for something to
somebody (its interpretant); and finally it stands for something to somebody in some respect (this respect is called its ground). These terms, representamen, object, interpretant and ground can thus be seen to refer to the means
by which the sign signifies; the relationship between them determines
the precise nature of the process of semiosis.
The relationship, Peirce argues, normally involves the three elements, representamen or sign, object, and ground in three kinds of ‘triadic’
structures or ‘trichotomies’ in whose terms the fourth element, the
interpretant, perceives. These are
(a) ‘triadic relations of comparison’ or logical possibilities based on
the kind of sign. These are the qualisign, a ‘quality’ which acts as a
sign once it is embodied; the sinsign, an actual thing or event which
1
References are to C. S. Peirce’s Collected Papers (8 vols.), ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss
and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931–58). A comprehensive 15 volume edition of Peirce’s work is in preparation: see Bibliography, p.
161. James K. Feibleman’s An Introduction to Peirce’s Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin,
1960) offers an extremely helpful commentary upon and systematization of Peirce’s
work. See particularly pp. 81–95 and 197 ff.
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104 structuralism and semiotics
acts simply and singly (as indicated by the prefix sin) as a sign; and
the legisign, a law that acts as a sign (i.e., not in the form of a single
object but as the abstract working of a set of rules or principles:
grammar operates as a recurring legisign in language).
(b) ‘triadic relations of performance’ involving actual entities in the
real world, based on the kind of ground. These are the icon, something which functions as a sign by means of features of itself
which resemble its object; the index, something which functions as
a sign by virtue of some sort of factual or causal connection with
its object; and the symbol, something which functions as a sign
because of some ‘rule’ of conventional or habitual association
between itself and its object.
(c) ‘triadic relations of thought’ based on the kind of object. These are
the rheme (or seme), a sign which indicates the understood possibility of an object to the interpretant, should he have occasion to
activate or invoke it; the dicent (or dicisign or pheme) which conveys
information about its object, as opposed to a sign from which
information may be derived; and the argument, a sign whose
object is ultimately not a single thing but a law.
Peirce goes on to propose various possible combinations of the nine
types of sign described above which would yield ten classes of sign: e.g.,
a dicent-symbol-legisign (a proposition); a rhematic-indexical-sinsign
(a spontaneous cry); a dicent-indexical-sinsign (a weathercock) and so
on. Combinations between the ten fundamental classes of signs
ultimately yield sixty-six fuller classes of signs and various groups
of these achieve fundamental importance in Peirce’s analysis and
systematization of logic.1
The complexity of Peirce’s system clearly arises from the fact that,
given his point of departure, anything which can be isolated, then
connected with something else and ‘interpreted’, can function as a
sign. This means that one of the most important areas in which his
notion of signs will usefully operate will be that of epistemology: the
analysis of the process of ‘knowing’ itself; of how knowledge is possible. Both for simplicity’s sake, and because of its centrality to our
1
For an extensive critique of Peirce’s categories, see Umberto Eco, op. cit., pp. 178 ff.
a science of signs
experience of the real world, most interpreters of Peirce have so far
tended to limit their attention to the application of his theories in this
area. According to Peirce, the framework for the existence of knowledge derives from the assertion of propositions through the second
‘triad’ of signs: icon, index and symbol. Their importance thus requires us
to take a closer look at them.
In the icon, the relationship between sign and object, or signifier and
signified, manifests, to use Peirce’s phrase, a ‘community in some quality’: a similarity or ‘fitness’ of resemblance proposed by the sign, to be
acknowledged by its receiver. Thus a diagram or a painting has an iconic
relationship to its subject in so far as it resembles it: it is the signifier to
its subject’s signified in the iconic mode.
In the index, the relationship is concrete, actual and usually of a
sequential, causal kind. The pointing finger is a signifier whose relationship to its signified is indexical in mode. A knock on the door is an
index of someone’s presence, and the sound of a car’s horn is a sign of
the car’s presence in the same mode. Smoke is an index of fire. A
weathercock is an index of the direction of the wind.
In the symbol the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary; it requires the active presence of the interpretant to make the
signifying connection. And of course, following Saussure, we can say
that the major systematic manifestation of signs in this mode occurs in
language. Where my pointing finger, or my observation of a leaf could
be said to be the index of a tree; where my painting or diagram of a tree
constitutes an icon of the tree, my utterance of the word ‘tree’ (or arbre,
or baum, or arbor) is a symbol of the tree because there is no inherent,
necessary ‘tree-like’ quality in that signifier: its relationship to an actual
tree remains fundamentally arbitrary (or ‘imputed’, to use Peirce’s
term) sustained only by the structure of the language in which it
occurs, and which is understood by its interpretant, and not by
reference to any area of experience beyond that.
It is important to note here that the ‘triad’ involves, not mutually
exclusive kinds of sign, but three modes of a relationship between sign
and object or signifier and signified which co-exist in the form of a
hierarchy in which one of them will inevitably have dominance over
the other two. As Jakobson observes, we can have symbolic icons,
iconic symbols, etc., and the nature of a sign’s ultimately dominant
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106 structuralism and semiotics
mode will depend finally on its context (a car’s horn used, in a film, to
indicate relief, safety, rather than danger, disaster, etc.). Thus a traffic
signal may, in terms of epistemology, be said to combine index (pointing to a situation and calling for immediate, causally related action)
and symbol (red, in our society, signals ‘danger’, ‘stop’; green signals the
opposite, and these arbitrarily related colours are binarily opposed by
the traffic signalling system, as symbols).
Peirce’s analysis tells us a good deal about the kinds of signs that
exist, about the way signs work, and what sort of procedures govern
the use we make of them. The immense importance of his theories and
the complexity and range of his writings on the subject mean that the
significance of his contribution to semiotic theory must be widely
recognized. Presumably the recent and rapidly increasing surge of
interest in the subject will ultimately acknowledge his true status.
Meanwhile, many other voices are heard,1 and in the absence of a
universally accepted theory of semiotics, we might now obtain some
further helpful insights by turning back from America to Europe, and
from one of Semiotics’s ‘founding fathers’ to the other: to the model of
linguistic communication suggested by Saussure.
One of Saussure’s most powerful interpreters in the matter of semiotics has been Roland Barthes. In his essay ‘Myth Today’2 he puts the
case that any semiotic analysis must postulate a relationship between
the two terms signifier and signified which is not one of ‘equality’ but of
‘equivalence’. What we grasp in the relationship is not the sequential
ordering whereby one term leads to the other, but the correlation which
unites them. In respect of language this (as I have termed it above)
‘structural relationship’ between sound-image (signifier) and concept
(signified) constitutes what Saussure calls the linguistic sign. In respect of
non-linguistic systems, says Barthes, this ‘associative total’ of signifier and
signified constitutes simply the sign.
His example is a bunch of roses. It can be used to signify passion.
1
A good idea of the range of recent work can be obtained from the two issues of the
Times Literary Supplement devoted to the subject under the heading ‘The Tell-Tale Sign: A
Survey of Semiotics’, 5th and 12th October, 1973. Umberto Eco’s recent A Theory of
Semiotics, gives a good, if rather abstract, account of the current ‘state of play’ and Pierre
Guiraud’s Semiology, though less up to date, tackles the central issues rewardingly.
2
This forms the last section of Mythologies, pp. 109–59.
a science of signs
When it does so, the bunch of roses is the signifier, the passion the
signified. The relation between the two (the ‘associative total’) produces the third term, the bunch of roses as a sign. And, as a sign, it is
important to understand that the bunch of roses is quite a different
thing from the bunch of roses as a signifier: that is, as a horticultural
entity. As a signifier, the bunch of roses is empty, as a sign it is full. What
has filled it (with signification) is a combination of my intent and the
nature of society’s conventional modes and channels which offer me
a range of vehicles for the purpose. The range is extensive, but
conventionalized and so finite, and it offers a complex system of ways
of signifying:
. . . take a black pebble: I can make it signify in several ways, it is a
mere signifier; but if I weigh it with a definite signified (a death sentence, for instance, in an anonymous vote), it will become a sign.
(Mythologies, p. 113)
However, the process of signification does not end there. Barthes
moves on to consider the ways in which ‘myth’ signifies in society
(and by ‘myth’ he means, as we have seen above, not ‘classical’ mythology so much as the complex system of images and beliefs which a
society constructs in order to sustain and authenticate its sense of its
own being: i.e. the very fabric of its system of ‘meaning’).
In the case of myth, he argues, we find again the tripartite signifying
operation described above: the signifier, the signified, and their product, the sign. However, myth is peculiar in that it invariably functions as
a second-order semiotic system constructed on the basis of a semiotic
chain which exists before it. That which had the status of a sign (i.e. the
‘associative total’ of signifier and signified) in the first system becomes
a mere signifier in the second. Thus, where language provides a model
for what we might call primary signification (as in the case of the bunch
of roses), the model for secondary (or mythical) signification is more
complex:
Everything happens as if myth shifted the formal system of the first
significations sideways. As this lateral shift is essential for the analysis
of myth, I shall represent it in the following way, it being understood,
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108 structuralism and semiotics
of course, that the spatialization of the pattern is here only a
metaphor:
Mythologies, p. 115
In other words, myth operates by taking a previously established sign
(which is ‘full’ of signification) and ‘draining’ it until it becomes an
‘empty’ signifier. One of Barthes’s best-known examples is the following:
I am at the barber’s, and a copy of Paris-Match is offered to me. On the
cover, a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes
uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning
of the picture. But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it
signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without
any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that
there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism
than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors.
I am therefore again faced with a greater semiological system: there is
a signifier, itself already formed with a previous system (a black soldier
is giving the French salute); there is a signified (it is here a purposeful
mixture of Frenchness and militariness); finally, there is a presence of
the signified through the signifier.
(Mythologies p. 116)
Barthes goes on to propose that this third term in myth (which in
language we would call the sign) should be called the signification, that the
first term (signifier) should be called the form and that the second (the
signified) should be called the concept. Thus, where in the first order of
a science of signs
signification, that of language, the relation of signifier to signified generates
the sign, in the second order of signification, that of myth, the relation of
form (i.e. the first order’s sign) to concept generates the signification.
With signification we have, of course, encountered an extremely
powerful, because covert, producer of meaning at a level where an
impression of ‘god-given’ or ‘natural’ reality prevails, largely because
we are not normally able to perceive the processes by which it has been
manufactured. Barthes’s analysis of semiosis, in moving via Saussure on to
this level, begins to take us ‘behind the scenes’ as it were of our own
construction of the world.
The fruitfulness of this notion can be seen when Barthes applies it
to the processes of signification which we traditionally term ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’. ‘Denotation’ we normally take to mean the
use of language to mean what it says: ‘connotation’ means the use of
language to mean something other than what is said. And, of course,
‘connotation’ is centrally characteristic of the ‘literary’ or ‘aesthetic’
use of language. In Barthes’s view, connotation represents the same
kind of ‘gearing up’ from denotation as myth does from ordinary
signification. Thus, connotation takes place when the sign resulting
from a previous signifier–signified relationship becomes the signifier of
a further one.
the first system is then the plane of denotation and the second system
. . . the plane of connotation. We shall therefore say that a connoted
system is a system whose plane of expression (i.e. signifier) is itself constituted by a signifying system: the common cases of connotation will of
course consist of complex systems of which language forms the first
system (this is, for instance, the case with literature).1
In short, the signifiers of connotation are made up of the signs (signifiers
related to signifieds) of the denoted system, and this makes connotation, and so literature at large, one of the numbers of ‘second-order
signifying systems’ which we characteristically superimpose upon the
‘first-order’ system of language.
There is also a reverse situation in which the sign of a prior
1
Elements of Semiology, pp. 89–90. The first parenthesis is my insertion.
109
110 structuralism and semiotics
signifier–signified relationship becomes the signified of a further one. In
this case, the ‘second-order’ system becomes a metalanguage. This is the
situation of semiotics itself. It acts as a metalanguage in respect of the
semiosis which it studies.
Human beings emerge from any account of semiotic structures as
inveterate and promiscuous producers of signs. As the work of LéviStrauss and others indicates, any aspect of human activity carries the
potential for serving as, or becoming a sign; we only have to ‘activate’
it in accordance with something like the above processes. As Umberto
Eco says, a sign is anything that can be taken as ‘significantly
substituting for something else’.1 Accordingly, nothing in the human
world can be merely utilitarian: even the most ordinary buildings organize space in various ways, and in so doing they signify, issue some kind
of message about the society’s priorities, its presuppositions concerning human nature, politics, economics, over and above their overt concern with the provision of shelter, entertainment, medical care, or
whatever. All five senses, smell, touch, taste, hearing, sight, can function
in the process of semiosis: that is, as sign-producers or sign-receivers. The
uses of perfume, of the texture of a fabric in clothing, the ways in which
the tastes produced by cooking signal status, location, ‘identity’, ‘foreignness’ are manifold. Moreover, each of these senses responds in
concert with the others to sign-systems designed to exploit them in
differing hierarchies. Conceivably there is a langue of cooking, of which
each meal is a parole, and in connection with which taste is the sense most
exploited, although sight and smell also have their role. Equally, there is
no doubt a langue of perfume and, as Barthes has demonstrated at length
(with complications, in his Système de la Mode) of ‘fashion’ and of writing
about fashion at large.2 Nevertheless, as Jakobson says, it is evident that
‘the most socialized, abundant and pertinent sign systems in human
society are based on sight and hearing’ (op. cit., p. 701).
Auditory signs are essentially different in character from visual signs.
The first use time, not space, as a major structuring agent. The second
use space rather than time. Auditory, ‘temporal’ signs tend to be sym1
Op. cit., p. 7.
See Barthes’s account of the ‘signifying systems’ of garments, food, cars and furniture,
Elements of Semiology, pp. 25–30.
2
a science of signs
bolic in character: visual, ‘spatial’ signs tend to be iconic in character. The
former signs, fully elaborated, yield in terms of art the major forms of
spoken language and music. The latter, visual and spatial signs, yield
the art-forms of painting, sculpture, architecture, etc. And of course,
beyond these broad generalizations, there are forms of art which
combine both: drama, opera, film, television etc.
The signs may be produced either organically, by the body, or instrumentally, by means of a technological extension of the body. Language is
the most ‘pure’ organic semiotic system. Every aspect of it signifies,
and it is produced solely by means of the body. When the ‘extension’
of the body, which we call a medium, causes one organic factor to
become dominant over the others (the telephone has this effect on the
voice: silent film had the same effect on bodily gesture) then it will
inevitably affect the nature of the discourse. That is, the medium will
begin to affect the message. When this takes extreme form, we find
ourselves confronted, not with a medium which simply transmits a
pre-packaged message, but with an autonomous semiotic system, with a
‘life’ – that is, with messages – of its own.
One of the most important examples of this process is the writing
system of a language. Although we are, through long experience,
habituated to our own writing system, there can be no doubt that it
does not simply record our language. As Jakobson puts it
Written language is prone to develop its peculiar structural properties
so that the history of two chief linguistic varieties, speech and letters,
is rich in dialectical tensions and alternations of mutual repulsions
and attractions.
(op. cit., p. 706)
And so, when we take up the question of what semiotics can contribute to the study of literature, the ‘peculiar structural properties’ of
writing clearly become crucial, as they form, semiotically, a large part
of what any piece of writing communicates. Writing, after all, combines two kinds of sign. Language, which is normally auditory in mode,
is made visual when it is written down or given printed form. To the
auditory sign’s commitment to time as its structuring agent is therefore
added (and in one sense, the process is also one of reduction) the visual
111
112 structuralism and semiotics
sign’s commitment to space. Thus writing imposes on language a linearity and a sequentiality and a physical existence in space which
speech does not have. Further, as we noticed above, auditory ‘temporal’ signs tend to be (in Peirce’s terms) symbolic in character, where
visual ‘spatial’ signs tend to be iconic in character. It follows that, in
writing, both kinds of sign will always be present and capable of
signification.
Thus, the two distinctive genres of language in its written form,
poetry and prose, emit iconic messages about their nature through the
visual means of typography over and above (or under and beneath) the
symbolic messages of their content. A poem is ‘set out’ in a different
form from that of a passage of prose: a novel ‘looks like’ a novel, not
like a text-book. The writer can choose to increase the intensity of this
iconic message, or to decrease it, in relation to the symbolic message
emitted by the ‘content’ of the writing, depending upon the nature of
the total message he intends.
The writer of, say, a detective novel, is normally concerned primarily
with content, and would find any iconic message beyond that of ‘this is
a detective novel’ to be merely an interference. On the other hand, a
novelist like Joyce might wish to raise the iconic level of the total
message so as to generate tension, irony, social comment, etc. So, in
this passage from Ulysses, the iconic message ‘this is a novel’ suddenly
changes:
Oyster eyes. Never mind. Be sorry after perhaps when it dawns on
him. Get the pull over him that way.
Thank you. How grand we are this morning.
IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS
BEFORE NELSON’S PILLAR TRAMS SLOWED, SHUNTED,
CHANGED trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure . . .
THE WEARER OF THE CROWN
Under the porch of the general post office shoeblacks called and
polished . . .
(Ulysses, pp. 107–8)
– and turns into ‘this is a newspaper’.
a science of signs
Similarly, the following passage from Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel
THRU employs a high degree of iconic communication:
unless the mirror is moved to the
sudden isolation
of seeing nothing whatever in the
rear
of
the
mind
and
no
narrator at all though this is only a manner of speaking since the text has
somehow come into existence but with varying degrees of presence either
bent or gazing into diasynchronic space or
But it needs adjusting. (p. 32)
In the following poems, both E. E. Cummings and William Carlos
Williams rely on visual, iconic signs as important ingredients of the
total message:
‘next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
113
114 structuralism and semiotics
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-iful
than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?’
He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water
e. e. cummings
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
William Carlos Williams
Cummings’s poem uses visual means to transmit the message ‘this
passage of writing is without form’ (his habitual rendering of his own
name, ‘e. e. cummings’ similarly represents a visual attempt at effacement of an intrusive ego). Meanwhile, on an auditory level, the ‘poetic’
form of the poem is of course the highly structured arrangement of
rhymes and rhythms traditionally recognized as a sonnet. The message
‘this is a sonnet’ emitted in the symbolic mode is thus effectively seen to
be overwhelmed by the message concerning formlessness (i.e. ‘this is
not a sonnet’) emitted in the iconic mode just as – and this, presumably,
is the ‘total’ message of the poem – inherited, traditional social
forms are overwhelmed and muffled by the mouthings of the
politician. The ultimate degradation brought about by war, it seems,
a science of signs
lies in the disintegration of language’s formal powers: the body of the
poem’s content is made up of the wreckage of patriotic songs and
slogans.
In William Carlos Williams’s poem, we see the process almost in
reverse. Here the imposition of a new and disturbing status on what
would otherwise remain a banal domestic piece of writing is brought
about by the visual iconic message which says ‘this passage of writing
constitutes a poem’: that is, ‘these words have a significance beyond
their overt meaning.’ Meanwhile, the symbolic signs emitted lack any of
the indications of ‘poemness’ that our culture leads us to look for and
expect. By these means, the poem is able to make us think about what
those expectations really are and whether or not we really endorse
them. It even makes us think about the nature of the social conventions
which invest ‘poems’ with ‘significance’, but deny it to other forms of
utterance. In thus using iconic means to subvert our expectations, both
poems prove fundamentally disturbing.1
This is not of course to say that, in referring more or less directly to
themselves, such poems are in any way unusual. The case has more
than once been made that all literary works of art are auto-referential to
a certain degree. And it seems to follow that, given the dominance of
the language-model, what is true of the ‘aesthetic function’ of language will also be true of the ‘aesthetic function’ of sign-systems at
large. As Jakobson puts it,
. . . introversive semiosis, a message which signifies itself, is indissolubly linked with the aesthetic function of sign-systems’.
(op. cit., p. 704)
In other words, if literature consists at least in part of signs that do
not signify in the ‘normal’ way because they signify themselves, then
1
Cf. Culler’s interesting discussion of Williams’s poem (op. cit., pp. 175–6) to which the
above account is really a response. It will be clear that although I agree that ‘when it is set
down on the page as a poem the convention of significance comes into play’, I do not
accept Culler’s conclusion that ‘we must therefore supply a new function to justify the
poem’. The poem’s ‘justification’ seems to me to reside in its implicit questioning of the
‘convention of significance’. It is about its own status and the social processes that
determine our response to its language.
115
116 structuralism and semiotics
the ‘aesthetic function’ of all other sign-systems can perhaps be said
systematically to involve breaking the ‘rules’ of signification in the
same way. Moreover, the ‘rules’ not only require a signifier, or signans
to refer beyond itself to a signified or signatum, they require it to do
so unambiguously. Yet, in the aesthetic use of language, signifiers
manifest, as we have seen, a high degree of ‘plurality’: that is, of
ambiguity. And, as Umberto Eco comments, ‘Semiotically speaking,
ambiguity must be defined as a mode of violating the rules of the
code.’1
It seems to follow that a semiotic analysis of all ‘aesthetic functions’
must in one sense see in them a paradoxical institutionalization of rulebreaking (a concept not very far distant, it will be remembered, from
the view expressed by Jakobson that poetry represents ‘organized violence committed on ordinary speech’). Art seen thus appears as a way
of connecting ‘messages’ together, in order to produce ‘texts’ in which
the ‘rule-breaking’ roles of ambiguity and self-reference are fostered
and ‘organized’ so that, as Umberto Eco sees it,
(a) many messages on different levels are ambiguously organized
(b) the ambiguities follow a precise design
(c) both the normal and ambiguous devices in any one message exert
a contextual pressure on the normal and ambiguous devices in all
the others
(d) the way in which the ‘rules’ of one system are violated by one
message is the same as that in which the rules of other systems are
violated by their messages.2
The effect is to generate an ‘aesthetic idiolect’, a ‘special language’
peculiar to the work of art, which induces in its audience a sense
of ‘cosmicity’ – that is, of endlessly moving beyond each established
level of meaning the moment it is established – of continuously
transforming ‘its denotations into new connotations’. In fact, the process has many similarities to the one described by Barthes in his
account of myth, where what has been established as a sign on one level
1
2
Umberto Eco, op. cit., p. 262.
Op. cit., p. 271.
a science of signs
of signification can be ‘drained’ so that it can then become a signifier on
another level, and it obviously confirms Barthes’s account of connotation
as a ‘second order’ system of signification based upon denotation. Eco
seems to be suggesting that the aesthetic message operates as a continuing ‘multi-order’ system of signification which moves from level to
level, its denotations becoming connotations in a kind of infinite progression. As a result, we never arrive at a ‘final’ decoding or ‘reading’ of
the aesthetic message, because each ambiguity generates further cognate ‘rule-breaking’ at other levels, and invites us continuously to dismantle and reassemble what the work of art seems at any point to be
‘saying’:
common artistic experience also teaches us that art not only elicits
feelings but also produces further knowledge. The moment that the
game of intertwined interpretations gets under way, the text compels
one to reconsider the usual codes and their possibilities.
(p. 274)
The process has obvious affinities with the one used by Barthes in S/Z.
As a result of it, the reader becomes more and more aware of the new
‘semiotic possibilities’ available within the codes. He is forced in consequence to ‘rethink’ their whole arrangement and, ultimately, that of
the ‘reality’ which they encode for him. Thus, to use Barthes’s terms, in
his new-found capacity as écrivain, the reader not only begins to ‘see the
world’ differently, he learns how to create a new world: ‘By increasing
one’s knowledge of codes, the aesthetic message changes one’s view of
their history and thereby trains semiosis’ (p. 274). The aesthetic message, then, exhibits the same double function as any language: it is both
affective (or emotive) and cognitive in mode.1 We are back, in a sense,
with Vico and with Lévi-Strauss. Like myth, art represents, not the mere
1
See Pierre Guiraud’s argument that, in terms of semiotics, the modes of any culture’s
range of experience are deployed in terms of two ‘poles’, the cognitive mode and the
affective mode. Their relationship is inversely proportional (the more an experience
inclines to one the less it will incline to the other) and never mutually exclusive. They
manifest themselves in signifying systems principally by means of two similarly related
expressive functions: the referential (cognitive) function and the emotive (affective)
function. Semiology, pp. 9–18.
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118 structuralism and semiotics
‘embroidery’ of reality, but a way of knowing it, of coping with it, and of
changing it.
This is not to deny that major modes of art will appear to involve an
apparently straightforward and stable commitment to an unchanging
world ‘beyond’ themselves. A book of a certain kind will always appear
as a window through which such a world is clearly visible. In it, the
signifiers appear to point directly and confidently to the signifieds. But
a central tenet of structuralism and semiotics is, as we have seen, that
even in cases where the aim of the work is utter realism (the detective
novel, Balzac’s Sarrasine), this ‘transparency’ of writing, this ‘innocence’
of literature, remains an illusion. Writing in a work of fiction (an
‘epistolary’ novel called Zoo: or letters not about love, 1923) the Russian
formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky typically forces the work to reveal its
own lack of innocence or transparency by making its central character
(a man writing letters to his loved one) continually refer to the
necessary self-reflexive character of all art:
There are two attitudes toward art.
One is to view the work of art as a window on the world.
Through words and images, these artists want to express what lies
beyond words and images. Artists of this type deserve to be called
translators.
The other type of attitude is to view art as a world of independently
existing things.
Words, and the relationships between words, thoughts and the
irony of thoughts, their divergence – these are the content of art. Art, if
it can be compared to a window at all, is only a sketched window.
(Zoo: or letters not about love, trans. Richard Sheldon, p. 80)
The reference to the ‘sketched window’ of art has of course a telling
semiotic effect when it occurs in the middle of that most ‘windowlike’ of art-forms, the novel made out of letters: in this case some of
them apparently actual letters exchanged between Shklovsky and a specific woman, and one of them (in a perfect example of ‘rule-breaking’
ambiguity) even ‘crossed out’ – although it remains perfectly legible –
with the reader advised to ‘skip’ it. No writing, such a work clearly states,
can be transparent: all writing (even when ‘obliterated’) signifies. The
a science of signs
moment it does so, it becomes a formative, mediating agency. In the
process, actual letters are turned into ‘literature’, truth becomes fiction,
‘real life’ becomes part of a novel. And so, despairingly, the central
character can complain
How I want simply to describe objects as if literature had never
existed; that way one could write literarily.
(p. 84)
But of course, that kind of pristine ‘literariness’ is no longer available.
We can never now use words as if literature had never existed.
The claims some literature makes to originality, to realism, to physical accuracy of description have ultimately to be seen in this depleting
light. To the semiotician, most works of literature, in emitting messages
that refer to themselves, also make constant reference to other works of
literature. As Julia Kristeva has pointed out, no ‘text’ can ever be completely ‘free’ of other texts. It will be involved in what she has termed
the intertextuality of all writing.
This leads to one of the most important insights into the nature
of literature that semiotics affords. For books finally appear to portray or reflect, not the real physical world, but a world reduced to
other dimensions; to the shape and structures of the activity of
writing: the world as a text. Yet, surprisingly, literature remains, at
least in the West, a centrally privileged form of signification. Our education system (and, some would add, the political system that
authenticates it, and that is reinforced by it) continues to promote a
‘literary’ version of the world as ‘real’, gives it a dominant, formative status, and requires all other possible versions of the world to
accommodate themselves to its shape. As a result, we tend to ‘literarize’ all our experience, reduce it to a kind of ‘book’: a process that,
it has been argued, has been continuous with us since the renaissance and the concomitant development of the book-industry.1 Yet,
if everything is capable of signification, why should the literary mode
be dominant? What is the nature of its domination? And what are
1
See Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (London: Routledge, 1962), passim.
119
120 structuralism and semiotics
the effects on us of what Jakobson called the written sign’s ‘peculiar
structural properties’?
One of the most interesting arguments concerning this aspect of the
semiotics of writing has been offered by Jacques Derrida, who proposes a ‘science’ of the written sign, called grammatology. His three
books, De La Grammatologie, L’Ecriture et la Différence and La Voix et le phénomène
(all published in 1967) in fact represent a sustained argument for a
reassessment of the nature and status of writing: a plea for writing to
be considered, not as, traditionally, the external ‘dress’ of speech, a
reduced ‘coded’ version of the voice whose ‘pure’ presence in its oralaural manifestation is usually given primacy (as, for instance, Plato
recommends in the Phaedrus) but as an entity in itself.
Our traditional commitment to the voice as the primary communicative instrument also commits us, in Derrida’s view, to a falsifying
‘metaphysics of presence’, based on an illusion that we are able, ultimately, to ‘come face to face once and for all with objects’.1 That is, that
some final, objective, unmediated ‘real world’ exists, about which we
can have concrete knowledge. Derrida sees this belief in ‘presence’ as
the major factor limiting our apprehension of the world: a distorting
insistence that, in spite of our always fragmentary experience, somewhere there must exist a redeeming and justifying wholeness, which we
can objectify in ourselves as the notion of Man, and beyond ourselves
as the notion of Reality. This yearning underwrites and guarantees
the belief that necessary connections exist between signifier and signified, and that these are ultimately locked in a ‘meaningful’, wholly
unbreakable, real-world-generating union.2
However, Derrida argues, this ‘humanist’ view of the world, its
centre ‘Man’, and European Man at that, has, in our century, finally
reached its conclusion. And the break-up of this world in fact results in
the break-up of European Man’s inherited system of signifier-signified
links. For if there exists no transcendental, ultimate, and so dominating
1
Jameson, The Prison-House of Language, p. 173. Jameson’s discussion of Derrida (pp. 173–
86) is particularly valuable, as is Culler’s, op. cit., pp. 131–3, 243–5, 247–9. See also JeanMarie Benoist, ‘The End of Structuralism’, Twentieth Century Studies, No. 3, May 1970, pp.
31–53. Derrida’s own short essay ‘La Différance’ in Tel Quel: Théorie d’Ensemble (Paris: Seuil,
1968), pp. 41–66, contains some of his central ideas in summary form.
2
See L’Ecriture et la Différence, pp. 41–4 and 409–11.
a science of signs
signified – i.e. ‘human nature’ – then the whole sphere of signification
must be vastly extended. The world ceases to be limited to, and determined by, an inherited pattern of meanings, a traditional word/
meaning ‘grid’. It ceases, that is, to be phonocentric. This break-up, and
the consequent extension of ‘meaning’s’ potential, can be fostered and
encouraged through the analysis of writing.
Derrida’s work can therefore be linked with that of Barthes as indicative of the kind of stress semiotics places on writing’s distinctive and
newly extended character. Once a ‘science of signs’ has demonstrated
that the sign-system of writing does not act simply as a transparent
window on to an established ‘reality’, it can be identified as a signsystem in its own right, with its own properties and its own distinct
character.
This has various effects. Primarily, it raises our level of ‘awareness’
about the nature of the written or printed word. We begin, for
instance, to recognize the extent to which all written words deal in and
involve overt or suppressed images of the process of writing (a good
example is William Carlos Williams’s poem This Is Just To Say quoted
above, but the most cursory glance at some of the traditional ‘conventions’ of the novel will make the same point: the ‘epistolary’ mode, the
use of the ‘intrusive’ or ‘omniscient’ author, the sort of devices presented and mocked in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy all confirm it). We also
begin to recognize the extent to which the status of the written word
has hitherto derived from European culture’s sense of itself as truly
definitive of Man’s role in the world. The commitment of European
education systems, by and large, to literacy as a primary skill – the only
skill for a good deal of their history that has been fostered and
rewarded – reveals a presupposition of immense proportions. But most
important, the conclusion emerges that writing need no longer be
considered as a substitute for something else that lies beyond it: a signifier in search of a signified, strung between the two poles of ‘affective’
and ‘cognitive’, ‘emotive’ and ‘referential’, fiction and fact, a secondary
element for ever acting as the ‘dress’ of a primary ‘presence’.
In place of this now eroded notion of the written word, Derrida
introduces a concept deriving from an identity of what (in French) he
terms différence and différance.
Différence (in English differentiation) represents the principle by which
121
122 structuralism and semiotics
language works: that is, the process we have referred to as ‘binary
opposition’, or the perception of phonemic differences between sounds.
As Saussure puts it, ‘in language there are only differences’. To differ or
differentiate, Derrida argues, is also to defer (the English sense of the
French différance is defer-ment): to postpone; to hold back; to propose a
distinction between entities such as will enable one to refer to the other,
or to be distinguished from it. That is, it represents involvement in a
structuring process.
Derrida argues that the ‘deferring’ process in which writing appears
to be involved – the written word acting as surrogate for the spoken
word – in fact applies to the spoken word itself. That is, language’s
grounding in différence (or distinctions) also implies a commitment to
différence (or deferring). Thus, speech cannot stand as the reality to
writing’s shadow, for speech already itself appears to be a shadow of
some prior act of signification, of which it manifests the ‘trace’, and so
on, in an infinite regression. In fact nothing has the ‘purity’ of absolute
presence. Speech is as ‘impure’, as ‘trace’-ridden, as ‘secondary’ as any
sign-system. Thus, when I say ‘tree’ I am as distant from the actual
physical entity growing in the earth as I am when I write ‘tree’.
Moreover, by analysing writing, I am able to analyse the process by
which language works because, far from being speech’s shadow, writing captures language’s essence. By virtue of its existence at one remove
from any outside ‘reality’ (although obviously it gestures in that reality’s direction) writing offers a model of language’s nature.
Finally, the character of writing also generates a permanent gap
between any text and any unitary ‘meaning’. If the text and its ‘meaning’ are not one and the same thing (and the ‘deferring’ nature of
writing, as Derrida sees it, makes this impossible) then a text can have
no ultimate, final meaning: in fact, it is in the nature of writing, and of
language, not to be confined to specific structures of meaning.1
Of course, this opens the door, not only for the kind of analysis at
which Barthes has proved adept, but also for politically minded analysts (e.g. those who write for the journal Tel Quel) to claim with
Philippe Sollers that, in a society which has imposed and institutionalized the written form of language as an overall dominating feature of
1
See L’Ecriture et la différence, p. 411 and De la Grammatologie, p. 74 ff.
a science of signs
its way of life, all writing is political writing: ‘Writing is the continuation of politics by other means.’1
But its full significance lies in the fact that this view of writing and of
language frees the sign from its subservience to that ‘reality’ (or presence) which it was supposed to serve. Seen thus, writing emerges as sui
generis: its own ‘thing’, not the creature of some superior reality. Writing, in short, does not ‘reproduce’ a reality beyond itself, nor does it
‘reduce’ that reality. In its new freedom, it can be seen to cause a new
reality to come into being.2
Grammatology, says Derrida, would be the science of the written sign
conceived in this way: the way in which writing has always been
conceived (he claims) in oriental societies. Its terms, its conditions, its
presuppositions, are not those of a dominant oral version of language,
but those of writing itself. It communicates, not as a surrogate for the
voice, not orally, but visually and legibly, in the way that, as we have
seen, Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel THRU does. And writing of this
kind (the work of authors such as Joyce, Becket, Mallarmé, RobbeGrillet and, earlier, Sterne come to mind) demands a criticism
genuinely suited to its nature.
Traditional critical responses will yield very little. What the semiotic
account of any writing needs, and certainly what writing conceived in
that light requires, is something, perhaps, like Barthes’s S/Z. As Georges
Poulet has described it, it requires a special sense of reading:
The work lives its own life within me; in a certain sense, it thinks itself,
and it even gives itself a meaning within me.3
– a sense which takes account of the fact that, in one way, the work
reads us as much as we read it. And that situation obviously calls for a
quite different kind of criticism, of the sort that Poulet terms a
1
Philippe Sollers, ‘Ecriture et Révolution’ in Tel Quel: Théorie d’Ensemble (Paris: Seuil, 1968),
p. 78.
2
It might then, according to Philippe Sollers, make common cause with revolution, as a
kind of ideal ‘red text’ (récit rouge). Théorie d’Ensemble, p. 79.
3
Georges Poulet, ‘Criticism and the experience of interiority’ in Richard Macksey and
Eugenio Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy, p. 62.
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124 structuralism and semiotics
total critical act: that is to say, the exploration of that mysterious interrelationship which, through the mediation of reading and of language,
is established to our mutual satisfaction between the work read and
myself.1
1
Ibid., p. 67.
5
CONCLUSIONS: NEW ‘NEW
CRITICISM’ FOR OLD ‘NEW
CRITICISM’?
P the major instance so far of the ‘total critical act’ called for by
Poulet remains Barthes’s S/Z. A final task of this book, therefore, is to
try to situate that work, its implications and the criticism that will
surely follow it, in a context which will highlight the particular contributions structuralism and semiotics have made and will continue to
make to the nature of our concept of and response to literature. One
obvious feature shared by these new ways of thinking about writing
and reading is a sense of an urgent, if somewhat unfocused, need for
radical change.
‘NEW CRITICISM’
Part of the difficulty of pinpointing the nature of the change needed
arises, oddly enough, as a simple matter of nomenclature. The ‘old’
critical orthodoxy which requires replacement goes, paradoxically, by
the name of ‘New’ Criticism.
New Criticism was itself conceived in opposition to an ‘older’ criticism which, in Britain and America in the late nineteenth and early
126 structuralism and semiotics
twentieth centuries, had largely concerned itself with material extraneous to the work under discussion: with the biography and psychology
of its author, or with the work’s relationship to ‘literary history’. The
general principles of New Criticism can be simply formulated. The
work of art, it proposed, and in particular the work of literary art,
should be regarded as autonomous, and so should not be judged by
reference to criteria or considerations beyond itself. It warrants nothing less than careful examination in and on its own terms. A poem
consists, less of a series of referential and verifiable statements about
the ‘real’ world beyond it, than of the presentation and sophisticated
organization of a set of complex experiences in a verbal form. The
critic’s quarry is that complexity. It yields itself to close analytic reading without overt reference to any acknowledged ‘method’ or ‘system’
and without drawing on any corpus of information, biographical,
social, psychological or historical, outside the work. ‘There is no
method’ said T. S. Eliot (a poet and critic much favoured by New
Criticism), ‘except to be very intelligent.’ As a result, an apparently
‘free-floating’ uncommitted critical intelligence directly confronts the
unmediated ‘word on the page’: its reading proves sensitive to those
devices concerned with the expansion or disintegration of referential
meaning (e.g. ambiguity, paradox, irony, punning, ‘wit’) and is
accordingly disposed to applaud stylistic qualities which foster them
(e.g. ‘intellectual toughness’, ‘tension’). It never goes ‘beyond’ the
work to validate its arguments.
Obviously (though unknowingly) related to Russian Formalism,
criticism of this kind flourished and grew in Britain and America in
the 1930s and 1940s, to the extent that, by the mid 1950s, it had
become, in the English speaking world at any rate, an established
orthodoxy. ‘New’ Criticism was criticism itself. Its fundamental ideological underpinning lay in notions of the values of ‘tradition’, and of
‘rooted’ organic community life in which complex levels of social
interaction wove a deeply satisfying sense of an inherited reality of
fixed, permanent dimensions. The cultural richness available in that
life (and embodied above all in its literature) was felt properly to
militate against any ‘reduced’ single vision or (it sometimes seemed)
purpose. And so, from I. A. Richards’s notion of a psychological
‘complexity’ at work in poem and experience, whereby a fruitful
conclusions: new ‘new criticism’ for old ‘new criticism’?
tension between opposing impulses organizes and refines them, and
thus enables the reader to abstain from reductive action in either
direction, to Cleanth Brooks’s and William Empson’s notion of a
multiplicity of meaning available in words and their poetic usage,
whereby fruitful ambiguity maintains a ‘balance’, enabling the reader
to avoid a reductive opting for single meaning, this ideological commitment to equipoise found itself transformed into a range of
unquestioned critical presuppositions. The poem seen thus becomes
self-maintaining; a ‘closed’ area, a verbal icon. And the general drift of
criticism in this form has been towards a sense of complexity on the
one hand and of self-sustaining detachment on the other: away from
‘unbalanced’ commitment and simplifying involvement. Accordingly,
its psychological mode is one of subjectivity. In fact, as Barthes points
out, literature’s current social function in this respect has become
central: ‘literature is that ensemble of objects and rules, techniques
and works, whose function in the general economy of our society is
precisely to institutionalize subjectivity’ (Sur Racine, pp. 171–2). Its
political and social modes are, appropriately, those of liberal
humanism.
Most of the arguments that can be directed against New Criticism
have already been mentioned in connection with the work of Roland
Barthes. Barthes’s total lack of reverence for the ‘text’ represents, of
course, a frontal assault on New Criticism’s first principle, which is that
discussion should severely limit itself to an objective analysis of the
‘words on the page’. We can perhaps summarize his arguments in the
form of four principles:
(1) the principle that the ‘innocent’ reader (that unlikely belle sauvage, sans prejudice, ideology, commitment or stock response, whose
ghostly rebuking presence stalks the pages of Practical Criticism)
cannot and does not exist: it is not possible simply to confront
the ‘words on the page’. A whole world of mediating presuppositions
of an economic, social, aesthetic and political order intervenes
between us and them and shapes our response: to deny this is simply
self-deceiving. (2) There exists consequently no ‘objective’ text
and no pre-ordained ‘content’ stored within it. As Jakobson has
pointed out, the ‘poetic’ function of language ‘by promoting the
palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and
127
128 structuralism and semiotics
objects’.1 Thus, no signifier is ineluctably tied to its signified. Following
Jakobson, Barthes insists on the work of literature’s commitment to
self-reference. It is not a medium for a pre-packaged ‘message’: message and medium are one. Of course, New Criticism acknowledges this
situation to a considerable degree, but its insistence on the sanctity of
the text and the informality of the critical process proves finally at
odds with it. In rejecting the notion of literature as an aspect of
biography, psychology, or ‘literary history’, New Criticism admittedly turned literature into something autonomous, but it was also
something strangely abstract, divorced from the concrete ‘real life’ of
its author and audience. As Serge Doubrovsky puts it, where ‘literary
history’ means authors without works, ‘New Criticism’ has tended to
mean works without authors.2 (3) The concomitant principle
reinforced by the work of Derrida, that writing and reading are not
the ‘natural’ processes that liberal humanism (characteristically
anaesthetized to the implications of much of its own technology)
presupposes – and (4) the final principle, matching the first, that all
critical positions and judgements in fact mask a complex political and
economic ideology: there is no ‘neutral’ or ‘innocent’ critical
position.
This latter point derives ultimately from Marxist theory, which
would see New Criticism as one of the ideological outgrowths of capitalism; dependent upon the ‘real foundations’ of its economic ordering
of the world, and covertly reflecting and reinforcing these, while
overtly it appears to address itself to quite other matters. Thus, New
Criticism’s admiration of complexity, balance, poise and tension could
be said to sustain the characteristic bourgeois concern for a ‘fixed’ and
established, unchanging reality, because it disparages forceful, consistent and direct action. Although opposed to ‘referential’ critical acts,
which go ‘beyond’ the poem’s context, New Criticism proves highly
selective in respect of what it considers that ‘context’ to be. Its presuppositions, Barthes argues, about the nature of man’s moral, psychological and social being are all too evident in its scarcely concealed
assumptions involving matters such as ‘taste’ and ‘sensitivity’ and its
1
2
Jakobson, ‘Closing statement’, op. cit., p. 356. See above, p. 86.
Serge Doubrovsky, The New Criticism in France, p. 114.
conclusions: new ‘new criticism’ for old ‘new criticism’?
habit of speaking of these as if they were objective and unchanging
human qualities, unaffected by historical and economic pressures. This
forms part of what Barthes dismisses as ‘dishonest’ criticism, based on
the supposition that the work criticized exists in some objective concrete way before the critical act; that, however complex or ambiguous it
may be, it can ultimately be reduced to a univocal ‘content’ beyond
which it is improper to go. Thus, New Criticism’s high regard for
‘ambiguity’, its admiration of polysemous structures, represent no real
leaning towards ‘total’ criticism so much as a bourgeois mistrust of
singlemindedness and commitment: the stances it prizes most –
sophistication, wit, poise – are those of a decaying aristocracy characteristically revered by a sycophantic middle-class.
Whatever we may think of the sort of necessary connection
between sub-structure and super-structure this implies, the process
also perhaps works the other way. The attitudes implicit in New Criticism itself may, in turn, be said to have been influential on the ‘real
foundations’. How many, one wonders, of the civil servants, the
teachers, the journalists who generate the climate of opinion that
ultimately shapes the actions of politicians and generals, derive at least
some elements in their total view of life from experiences whose
essence is literary? Mass literacy, and an education system firmly
based on it, has tended in twentieth century Europe and America to
establish and reinforce an equation between literature and life that
would have astonished any preceding age. When that equation comes,
through the mediation of literary criticism, to acquire positive prescriptive force in respect of morality, politics, even economics, and
when its presuppositions find themselves transmitted at large and
unquestioned throughout an all-embracing system of education, then
it seems reasonable to expect that ‘crises’ in one area will find themselves mirrored in another.
Eventually, the sense of crisis proves to be the agency which generates the need for change. When liberal humanism in America and
Western Europe encountered the series of debilitating post-war crises
of conscience that ran from Algeria to Suez to Vietnam, then the criticism which sustained that humanism, and which was sustained by it,
was similarly shaken. In short, the students who rejected liberal politics
in the nineteen-sixties as a mystified game, rejected liberal (so-called
129
130 structuralism and semiotics
‘practical’) criticism as part of the same package. It seemed no less of a
game: literally ludicrous.
‘NEW’ NEW CRITICISM
What has a ‘new’ New Criticism to offer then, as a replacement for an
old and discredited New Criticism? Certainly, Barthes and others are
prepared to embrace the total implications of the work of art’s selfreferentiality without any limits imposed by a sense of an ultimate
‘objective’ or concrete reality beyond itself to which the work must be
seen to refer. ‘New’ New Criticism would thus claim to respond to
literature’s essential nature in which signifiers are prised utterly free of
signifieds, aiming, in its no-holds-barred encounter with the text, for a
coherence and validity of response, not objectivity and truth. The most
important feature of this process is that it offers a new role and status to
the critic. It makes him a participant in the work he reads. The critic
creates the finished work by his reading of it, and does not remain
simply the inert consumer of a ‘ready-made’ product. Thus the critic need
not humbly efface himself before the work and submit to its demands:
on the contrary, he actively constructs its meaning: he makes the work
exist; ‘there is no Racine en Soi . . . Racine exists in the readings of
Racine, and apart from the readings there is no Racine.’1 None of these
readings is wrong, they all add to the work. So, a work of literature
ultimately consists of everything that has been said about it. As a result, no
work ever ‘dies’: ‘A work is eternal not because it imposes a single
meaning on different men, but because it suggests different meanings
to a single man, speaking the same symbolic language in all ages: the
work proposes, man disposes.’2 Barthes’s S/Z remains the exhilarating
monument to this ‘total’ rejection of the critic’s passive role. To this
one should add Barthes’s concomitant insistence on a new emphasis on
literature as it really is: a signifying system which characteristically and
autonomously employs the specific activities of reading and writing,
and which is not simply concerned to deliver a pre-ordained ‘content’
to the reader.
1
2
Doubrovsky, op. cit., p. 7.
Roland Barthes, Critique et vérité, p. 51.
conclusions: new ‘new criticism’ for old ‘new criticism’?
. . . we have not been able to recognise clearly the nature of the literary
object, which is a written object. From the moment that one admits
that the work is made with writing (and draws the consequences from
that admission) then a certain science of literature becomes possible
. . . This cannot be a science of content . . . but a science of the
conditions of content, that is, a science of forms.1
In pursuit of that ‘science of forms’ and in place of a criticism
obsessed with content, endlessly aiming to exhibit its own ‘sensitivity’,
or to discover facts about the author’s psychology, or the ‘real world’
beyond, or to assign unitary concrete and permanent ‘meanings’ to
works of literature, Jonathan Culler has recently proposed.
. . . a poetics which strives to define the conditions of meaning.
Granting new attention to the activity of reading, it would attempt to
specify how we go about making sense of texts, what are the interpretive operations on which literature itself, as an institution, is
based.2
The key concept is obviously that of ‘poetics’: a concern, not with
content, but with the process by which content is formulated. It rests on an
analogy made with one of the fundamental developments of modern
linguistics: the notion that the central task of linguistic investigation is
not, ultimately, to describe a corpus of data, but ‘to account for facts
about language by constructing a formal representation of what is
involved in knowing a language’ (p. 26). Applied to literature, this
model suggests that ‘a text can be a poem only because certain possibilities exist within the tradition: it is written in relation to other
poems’ (p. 30). In short, criticism needs a Saussure. For just as linguistics attempts to account for an abstract system (langue/competence)
which generates the concrete event (parole/performance) so literary
criticism should attempt to account for a ‘poetics’ of writing and
1
Op. cit., pp. 56–7. Both these passages from Critique et vérité are subjected to valuable
scrutiny by Gabriel Josipovici in The World and the Book, pp. 264 and 270. I recommend his
treatment of the subject at large, pp. 256–85.
2
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. viii.
131
132 structuralism and semiotics
reading, conceived as an abstract system of conventions, by whose
means ‘poems’, ‘novels’ etc. are generated, and are perceived as such
by members of the culture involved.
Raising his sights from the level established by previous structuralists
who have been largely concerned with individual literary performances and the development of discovery procedures appropriate to
them, Culler aims to establish a concept of literary ‘competence’ capable of generating all the elements of the edifice that we collectively
recognize as literature. He thus attempts to make explicit the underlying ‘set of conventions for reading literary texts’ that would constitute such competence (p. 118). These, after all, are the conventions that
permit us to ‘make sense’ of poetry, and the fact that it is possible –
however generally – to formulate them; e.g. the ‘rule of significance’
(which requires the poem to be read as expressing a ‘significant’ attitude to some large problem), the ‘rule of metaphorical coherence’
(which insists that the two component aspects of the metaphor exhibit
some consistent relationship) and the ‘rule of thematic unity’ (which
we learn to look for, applaud, and so construct) enable the argument to
focus rewardingly on the nature of writing as a social institution and of
reading as a social activity.
Following Derrida, Culler’s structuralist commitment reveals itself to
best advantage in his insistence that writing cannot be treated on the
model of speech. The written word (the stuff of literature) is
independent of the ‘presence’ of a speaker, and as an object in its own
right enjoys an autonomous ‘productivity’. That is, it characteristically
subjects the overt signifier-signified ligament to a covert and potentially dislocating strain, finally making it possible to ‘free’ the one from
the other. If man merely complies with the structure of his language to an
extent that justifies Heidegger’s assertion ‘language speaks, not man’,
the same principle forces a similar conclusion in respect of literature:
writing writes, not authors. So, writing’s autonomy in respect of the
signifier-signified connection ultimately yields the fundamental
paradox of literature:
. . . its formal and fictional qualities bespeak a strangeness, a power,
an organization, a permanence which is foreign to ordinary speech.
Yet the urge to assimilate that power and permanence or to let that
conclusions: new ‘new criticism’ for old ‘new criticism’?
formal organization work upon us requires us to make literature into a
communication, to reduce its strangeness . . .
(p. 134)
The means whereby that ‘reduction’ takes place must then become a
major element in the design of a ‘poetics’ appropriate to our culture.
As the age of Western European technological and cultural preeminence recedes, so the communicative, mediating modes promoted
by that pre-eminence emerge as the partial, distorting agencies they
are. Structuralism’s distinctive contribution to literary criticism may
well lie, as has been said, in its recognition of the nature and implications of those modes in the particular form of the acts of reading and
writing, and of their function in the institutionalizing process that has
generated our notion of literature.
It follows that if we can construct what Culler calls ‘a poetics which
stands to literature as linguistics stands to language’1, we shall come
closer to an understanding of the theory of the practice of reading and
writing: that is, of one of the fundamental processes that finally defines
us. And this, ultimately, is the goal to which structuralist criticism
ought to be directed: ‘to read the text as an exploration of writing, of
the problems of articulating a world’.2 How we articulate our world
determines, as Vico discovered, how we arrive at what we call reality.
There could be no more crucial objective for any discipline.
1
2
Op. cit., p. 257.
Ibid., p. 260.
133
AFTERWORD
‘Congratulations’
‘Thank you’
‘Now: do you mind if I bring up something that’s rather personal?’
‘Not at all’
‘I was wondering if you planned to do anything about . . . well, about your
accent?’
‘Er . . .?’
‘Well, you are going to be teaching English after all’
It was 1955. I’d just huffed and puffed my way over the final hurdles
leading to a slightly shady Bachelor’s degree in the subject known as
‘English language and literature’. The enquiry came from my tutor. Of
course, I knew only too well what he meant. But at that age, I was
bloody-minded enough to let what I thought of as ‘the facts’ speak for
me. Accent? Mine couldn’t have been a more English one. I’d never
spoken and could not speak any language other than English. I was
born, raised, and had gone to school right in the middle of England: in
Birmingham, about twenty-five miles from Shakespeare’s birthplace.
Both my parents were English. I spoke the language like a native and my
accent was unmistakable. It announced my Midlands origin with an
ancient cadence. I was a native, for heaven’s sake! A Brummie.
afterword
But that was really the problem. In those days, being a native speaker
certainly didn’t guarantee that you spoke the language properly. In fact,
to speak it as I did was regarded by some as scarcely to speak English at
all. The penalties incurred by intonations of the Brummie sort were
appropriately severe. Peremptory exclusion from the realm of the ‘educated’ was the least of them. The attention of offenders might be
brusquely drawn to the instruments of phonetic cleansing glinting
menacingly in the corner of Nurse’s room. Carbolic early-morning
regimes of industrial-strength vowel-laundering could easily loom. To
propose (as I once did) that the Bard himself – my fellow Midlander –
might have sounded a bit like me, was to dice with retribution of a
well-honed physical and spiritual sort. Reaching for his cane, my
empurpled headmaster asked if I was a communist.
In the event, history rather than MI5 came to the rescue. Although,
on a conscious level, I deliberately did nothing about it, my accent
nevertheless underwent the standard phonetic attrition of the years:
first erosion and then replacement by a mixture of the sibilants of
South Wales, the aspirates of America, and the myriad syllabic adjustments fostered by appetite, vanity, and zealous resort to dance-hall,
jazz-club and cinema. Finally, the whirligig of time emphatically
brought in his revenges when, at the end of the first class I ever taught
in a university in upstate New York, a student congratulated me on the
way I spoke, terming it ‘wonderful’, and adding that I sounded just like
David Niven.
Talk about the kiss of death. But I am now able, on reflection, to
recognise in that exchange a livelier element that strikes me as rather
more significant: an initial and formative encounter with one of the
first principles of structuralism. At an early stage of this book, I sketch
out the case that what we think of as reality lies ‘not in things themselves, but in the relationships which we construct, and then perceive,
between them’ (p. 7). This, I argue, supports a way of looking at the
world in which ‘the nature of every element in any given situation has
no significance by itself, and is in fact determined by its relationship to
all the other elements involved in that situation . . .’ As a result, ‘the full
significance of any entity or experience cannot be perceived unless and
until it is integrated into the structure of which it forms a part’ (p. 7).
Above all, I conclude, this seems to be the case in respect of language.
135
136 afterword
In these terms, my convergence with the New World can be said to
have had a manifestly structuralist tinge. It certainly involved language.
It placed particular emphasis on the complex role played by speech in
the operation of a specific culture or way of life. And one conclusion
was inescapable. My accent undoubtedly signalled something, but its
message was neither given nor unchanging. In fact, depending on its
location, in Britain or in the United States, it could evidently transmit
quite opposite ‘meanings’. These seemed to derive, not from my vowel
and consonant sounds in themselves, but entirely from the structure of
the culture within which they were uttered and to which they were
directed. Thus it seemed that, regardless of my headmaster’s worries
about Bolshevik insurgency, my accent conveyed, in itself, no essential
message at all. Indeed, the very idea of its existence ‘in itself’ began to
seem rather problematical. It suddenly appeared – in upstate New York
of all places – that a tyranny which for generations had branded me
and my fellow Brummies forcefully on the tongue might readily be
overthrown. To some extent a prolonged celebration of that feeling of
release still animates this book. And I’d be surprised if a similar sense
of gleeful ungagging were not still just about discernible in the
purpose and the title of the series in which it first appeared.
To generalise: if, before the nineteen-sixties, Britain had done its best
to stop the mouths of generations of its tongue-tied citizens, America
and France – that revolutionary junta – thereafter gave them voice.
Moreover, where my informal experience with language in the United
States was certainly refreshing – as if a burden had been lifted – my
formal involvement with it, in terms of the academic study of linguistics, proved in a much broader sense to be liberating. For once, I
was in the right place at the right time. The 1940s and 1950s had seen
the fine pre-Chomskyean flowering in America of one of the major
intellectual enterprises of the previous hundred years: the immensely
fruitful co-operation between ‘structuralist’ concepts and procedures
in the fields of linguistics and of anthropology. The connection
between language and culture which this established, with its dawning
recognition that way of speaking and way of life were in effect
coterminous and inseparable, resulted in a decisive advance in our
understanding of and purchase on the complex nature of the worlds
that human beings create. Its grounding perception of language as an
afterword
inward-looking system of self-validating structures had provided the
means for many of the first sympathetic studies of native American or
‘Indian’ languages and ways of life which did not impose on them or
judge them by warping European standards. The initial impulse for
such work no doubt sprang from the zeal of Christian missionaries,
avid to bring word of their English-speaking God to a host of potential
converts. But its broader implications, not least for American, European, and particularly for British culture, could be judged, rightly it
seemed to me, to be enormous.
If Structuralism and Semiotics has any originality – and as an introductory
text it modestly aspired to have none – it lies in the suggestion that the
origins of structuralism are to be found in the United States as much as
in France: that the influence of American structural linguistics on
French anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss was crucial to its
development and thus, in my own experience, to a formative change in
our ways of thinking about the world. When those ways of thinking
came under sharp attack – as they did in the British academic world of
the 1970s and 1980s – it was handy to be able to point out that, far
from offering yet another instance of the clever pirouetting of
irresponsible left-wing European intellectuals (the adjectives were
interchangeable), structuralism’s roots were also embedded deep in
the soil of the great democratic republic across the Atlantic. Its citizens,
it could be added, not only spoke our language. When it came to the
push, during the war, they had probably also saved our bacon.
To some degree, as the above makes clear, the impact was personal
and perhaps, as a result, it should be discounted. It is always difficult to
distinguish the casual revelations of growing up from the disconcerting
groundswells of history. However, in my own case, maybe the two had
to some extent coincided. Having encountered the American brand of
structuralism, I duly returned, unwittingly primed, to late nineteenfifties Britain. There, as luck, and a certain amount of discreet lobbying
would have it, I was appointed to a coveted post at the University of
Wales in Cardiff.
It is often necessary to explain to non-British readers – and this is still
lamentably so in the case of a number of British readers – that Cardiff is
not in England. Of course, it lies close to the English border and manifests at first sight what appears to be a standard provincial Englishness.
137
138 afterword
Nonetheless, during the latter part of the twentieth century, the city
gradually revealed itself to be interestingly, even disturbingly, nonEnglish, with the result that it increasingly became an excellent vantage-point from which to observe what might be termed the ‘edge’ of
Englishness. I’m referring of course to the frontiers of a specific culture
or way of life, although history demonstrates that, for the Welsh, their
neighbour’s ‘edge’ has on occasion proved to be something that can
also be felt as well as observed. To speak personally, my own perception
of it served gradually to make evident something that for most English
and many British people had hitherto been almost inconceivable as
well as virtually invisible: the plain fact that Englishness had an edge; a
limit, a frontier, a boundary, a terminus. It was not, therefore, universal, endless, transcendent, the way things were supposed to be. Nor
could it, as a result, be a license or a template for correcting them until
they were.
Needless to say, I was by no means the first British academic whom
the revolutionary democracies of the United States and France had
taught to perceive, albeit dimly, not only how cultures were constructed, but the means by which some of them sought to conceal their
own constructedness under a cloak of inevitability. It is also unsurprising that such perceptions should present themselves in Britain at a time
when, hindsight confirms, the fulcrum of English-speaking power in
the world was shifting decisively from one side of the Atlantic to the
other. Each of these factors contributed something to the atmosphere
and the impulse that generated this volume, and indeed the New Accents
series at large. But the subtle imperatives of a particular location, the
disconcerting liminality of Cardiff itself, were also crucial.
As one of the first volumes in the series, Structuralism and Semiotics could
in any case lay claim to a mildly subversive purpose. It had little concern with the then-dominant British notion that the purpose of criticism was to address the question of literary worth. It sought to evaluate
and uphold no ‘great tradition’ of novels, plays, or poems. Its interest
lay rather in the distinctive nature of the literary artefact and in the
ways in which its ‘literariness’ might be described and accounted for.
Perhaps, as a result, a number of early reviewers seemed anxious, less to
read it than to cast around for rubber gloves and a waste-disposal unit.
Their tone was often nervously jocose. Terms such as ostranenie and
afterword
bricolage, names such as ‘Shklovsky’ and ‘Todorov’, provoked gales of
brawny incomprehension. ‘Common sense’, a much-treasured item in
the repertoire of academic hysteria, was increasingly evoked, appealed
to, trundled out and creakingly flexed. Choruses of ‘but surely this is all
dealt with in Biographia Literaria?’ trilled anxiously from Wine Manciple
and Senior Fellow. Vicars from Swansea wrote darkly to university
Principals. In an atmosphere of truculent bafflement, ‘idiotics’ was
only one of a number of less than rapier-like coinages, jauntily paraded as part of what began to seem like a desperate project to submerge the whole enterprise in a welter of prophylactic giggling. For a
while, structuralism virtually became the unacceptable face of a larger
evil called ‘theory’, a weapon of mass destruction wielded, sagacious
academic voices assured us, by malevolent forces plotting the end of
civilisation as we knew it. There were rumours of favourable reviews
ruthlessly suppressed by one leading literary journal. There were
intemperate exchanges, to which I couldn’t resist contributing, in
another. Those were the days.
Just why the structuralist perception was felt to be so readily, so
necessarily, dismissable was never satisfactorily explained. Did it have
something to do with the fact that, springing from the broadly democratic backgrounds of France and America, it did not employ the
notions of ‘taste’ and ‘discrimination’ as overt weapons of class warfare? After all, the principles of a method of analysis such as structuralism can be systematically set out, taught, and learned. That was – and is
– the central assumption and raison d’être of this book. On the other
hand, the cloudier refinements of appraisal and assessment could
hardly, their purveyors in the United Kingdom seemed always anxious
to demonstrate, be so readily transmitted. F. R. Leavis’s worryingly
prim model ‘This – doesn’t it? – bears such a relation to that; this kind
of thing – don’t you find it so? – wears better than that.’ was all very
well.1 But in practice, the tweedy discussion of taste, even the brandishing of lengthy quotations in the name of discrimination, often seemed
to decline – not without a certain relish – into bad-tempered hectoring, wholesale denunciation and bullying character-assassination. To a
1
See F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit London: Chatto & Windus 1952, Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books 1962, pp. 215, 211–22
139
140 afterword
degree, it seemed, taste and discrimination, even the commonly pursued ‘true judgement’, were things you either had or you hadn’t: to
those who lacked any or all of them, they looked almost like qualities
you had to be born with.
The idea that access to important matters of common concern can
legitimately be restricted on the basis of birth has always suited sections of British society rather well. Of course, I exaggerate. But in the
1960s and 1970s it was (and to some degree still is) the case that of the
three main instruments of government in the British Isles, the Crown,
the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, admittance to two
was restricted, wholly or in part, to those who inherited such rights by
blood. To some, the ultimate crystallisation of such a civilisation – its
literature – could scarcely be held susceptible to examination in any
potentially de-mystifying terms such as those which structuralism
seemed determined to bring to bear. Had not the critical tradition
extending from Coleridge to Matthew Arnold and through T. S. Eliot to
F. R. Leavis spoken chillingly of the truly small number of those genuinely capable of appreciating great writing?: of the consequent need for
an ‘elect’ or praetorian élite of ‘aliens’ to defend and preserve the
culture such writing embodied; a select, priestly ‘clerisy’ who would
act as its guardians and arrange its carefully filtered transmission? To
the extent that structuralism, as the leading edge of ‘theory’, challenged all that, to the degree that it helped puncture the balloons of
‘discrimination’ and ‘taste’ by a pinpricking examination of the social
and linguistic interests served by such fantasies, then, from a British
standpoint at any rate, it looked suspiciously like evidence of a mutiny
within the ranks.
Of course, experience of these matters in the United States was
rather different. Whereas in Britain, structuralism seemed an initial
step in a democratising process whereby literary texts might be
reinserted into the culture and society from which a Romantic, highfalutin’ sense of Art had prised them, critical theory on the other
side of the Atlantic appeared to offer opportunity of another sort. As
Geoffrey Hartman has recognised, it seemed capable of bankrolling
not a return to Englishness, but an escape from it: the development
of a truly American literary criticism. No longer need the transatlantic knee bend before a deadening ‘Arnoldian Concordat’, that
afterword
confection of inherited tradition and canon assembled and insisted
upon by critics from Coleridge on. As ever, ideas imported from
France seemed at first to offer to Americans the heady prospect of
freedom.2
That battle continues. Meanwhile, it would be foolish to deny that, as
part of it, a rougher-hewn and more deeply-rooted American tradition
has for some time taken another view, judging the development of
literary theory, and in particular those who deal in it, to be committed
to mystification of a different kind; one which actively diverts literature
from its potentially liberating involvement with a general public and
steers it into the stultifying embrace of professional academics – selfserving ‘specialists’ with their own careers to tend and a cash-crop of
jargon to cultivate and harvest. Thus, paradoxically, what was enthusiastically greeted as ‘left-wing’ by some in Britain, has come in time to
be no less forcefully derided as ‘right-wing’ by others in America. Yet
even this offers, as no self-respecting theorist could resist pointing out,
an excellent example of the fundamental structuralist principle
outlined above.
This is not to deny a more general sense amongst literary critics on
both sides of the Atlantic that in any case, for structuralism, the game is
finally up. The oppositions which it discerned, and on which its most
penetrating analyses depended, have, under the deconstructive
onslaught of philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and others, come to
appear less solid, scarcely certain, and decidedly unverifiable. Instead,
they have started to look uncomfortably like the unconscious prejudices of a language and a way of life in search of order and stability in a
world that can genuinely offer neither. Just as the poised and carefully
balanced ‘ambiguities’ admired by a formalist New Criticism began,
when more rigorously prosecuted by structuralist analysis, to shatter
into the undecideable, contradictory elements of aporia, so the pursuit
of all structures now seems a doomed chasing after permanency, little
better than a kind of whistling in the dark, a desperate clutching at
control whilst teetering on the brink of a void. It’s a situation which, to
be fair, Roland Barthes had himself appeared finally to recognise and, in
2
See Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness (New Haven and London, Yale University
Press, 1980), pp. 1–15.
141
142 afterword
his most ambitious work S/Z, tried to contain by the imposition of his
notorious five ‘codes’ (see above, pp. 94–99).
But of course the Derridean project of ‘deconstruction’ is bound, by
definition, to prove uncontainable and it seems by now to have dealt
structuralism a fatal, disintegrating blow. Yet, in its wake, what has
come to be called ‘post-structuralism’ appears in the very manner of its
self-announcement to be committed, willy-nilly, to a recognition of
structuralism’s role; awarding it, in that ‘post’, some sort of initiating,
ground-breaking status. And if, in these fast-moving times, a book
written more than twenty-five years ago can claim any continuing
value, that of Structuralism and Semiotics perhaps lies in the record it offers
of the first, tentative staking out of what can now be seen as a vitally
fruitful terrain.
One of the most important insights achieved by the last century’s
combined projects of anthropology and linguistics was probably the
recognition of structuralism’s – and so ‘theory’s – ubiquity. Nobody
just exists. If the distinctive human characteristic resides in our habitual
involvement in ‘ways of life’ in terms of their constant making and remaking of apparent structures that cause the world to seem meaningful, then the capacity for that involvement derives from and depends
upon an abstract ‘theoretical’ knowledge of how those structuring procedures work. That knowledge, which usually operates outside of conscious awareness, is something we all require in order to be able to live
as members of a culture, and this remains so, regardless of whether such
structures and structuring are logically sustainable by ‘objective’ standards. If to be human is to belong to a way of life, then it is also to be a
structuralist. And to be a structuralist is ultimately also to be a theorist.
Attitudes to interpretation which grandly proclaim their holders to be
theory-free, such as T. S. Eliot’s ‘there is no method except to be very
intelligent’ (see above, p. 126) can readily be persuaded to reveal their
roots in complex if deliberately self-masking theories, not only of literature, but of history and economics too. Irreverently probed by structuralists and others, even the academic subject called ‘English’ will own up
to its stake in the political programme it was invented to serve.
Structuralism’s capacity to tease out such matters, its ability to ‘x-ray’
texts and cultures and to gain access, as a result, to whatever it is they
hold in common, made it a powerful analytic tool. But does it still have
afterword
anything to say, twenty-five years on, to the student of literature? In
the strong belief that it does, and as a concluding example of the
forceful insights it remains able to deploy, let me offer a slightly revised
version of the four general maxims initially sketched out above (see
pp. 127–28). Any student of literature would do well to ponder their
implications:
1.
2.
3.
There are no ‘innocent’ readers. We all confront texts partly or
wholly in the grip of the structures bequeathed to us by our own
culture, which we have no choice but to inherit. They form the
basis of the economic, political, social and aesthetic presuppositions that make us what we are.
There are no ‘objective’ or ‘transparent’ texts. All texts, literary or
otherwise, contain structuring features of language that relentlessly and unavoidably interpose themselves between the words on
the page and whatever it is those words refer to. Rhymes, rhythms,
assonances, alliterations, metaphors occur in all uses of language,
not just those we think of as literary. They cannot be eradicated. In
the end, they ensure that all texts draw attention in some degree to
their own use of language, and thus to themselves, as well as to
whatever they announce as their object.
There is no ‘neutral’ criticism. All critical stances betray some
aspect or other of the political and ideological structures within
which they are adopted, whether they support or aim to subvert,
or even ignore them. Criticism comes from within a society, and
that society’s concerns cannot help but mark in some way the
criticism it produces.
I still believe, unrepentantly, that precepts such as these can offer significant help in the negotiation of a number of the confusions that still
swirl about literature and the relation of criticism to it. In fact, it now
seems to me, turning these pages once more, that they lead inevitably,
and as a bonus, to a fourth: one which I’m happy to propose as a kind
of structuralist springboard into the future:
4.
The text can’t ‘mean’ by itself. It isn’t a finished, ready-made
product, with its meaning secreted inside it, like a stone in a
143
144 afterword
cherry, waiting to be plucked out. Any text only becomes meaningful when the reader works on it, by reading, and thus inserts it
into a specific discursive structure responsive to the pressures –
economic, political, historical – of a particular time and a particular place. Its meaning depends upon and derives from this process,
and will change as the discourse into which it is inserted changes.
This must mean that the reader is not the inert consumer of a
pre-packaged text. The reader uses the text in order to produce
meaning. In short, the text doesn’t mean. The reader means by the text.
No doubt any claims I make for structuralism’s ability to clarify,
enlighten, and generally sweep away critical clutter should be set
against the proliferating clouds of mystifying theoretical jargon that
currently fog the pages of many a literary journal. But despite all the
hand-wringing which that produces, we can no longer fail to recognise
that the slogans it set out to replace, proposing ‘the common pursuit of
true judgement’ or defending a ‘great tradition’, were themselves
aspects of an older, and more pernicious – because vehemently denied
– system of mystification: one which deployed not only jargon – often
the peculiarly British sort that masquerades as plain speaking – but
sackfuls of those deodorised and smoothed over presuppositions and
prejudices from which we love to construct the ‘self-evident’.
Inevitably, Chicken-Licken remains alive and well, his squawks
defending a notion of art and of literature that will always claim to be
able to soar beyond the reach of a material here, a concrete now and a
critical analysis rooted in both. If structuralism did nothing else, it
challenged, or offered the means to subvert those presumptions. It
made the reader a discoverer, not of someone else’s meaning, but of the
basis of his or her own. It established the grounding principle, to
paraphrase Roland Barthes (see above, p. 130), that if literature proposes, the reader disposes. The active, involving role this gives to the
critic’s voice is one which Structuralism and Semiotics energetically sought
to foster. It still does.
So, looking back, I’m rather glad I didn’t bother to do anything
about my accent. As things turned out, it was much more useful to try
to do something, if only a very little, about the context in which
accents occur, and are perceived: factors which can make them sound,
afterword
as a result, quite new. It is tempting to suggest that my fellow
Midlander, that tortuously-vowelled, bald, bearded and beruffed playwright whose business was always the way people speak to each other,
might even have approved.
Terence Hawkes
February, 2003
145
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(revised, 1983)
The mass of writings on structuralism and semiotics is so vast that a
simple alphabetical listing of material would not only lie beyond the
scope of this book, but would also defeat its purpose. What follows is a
selective list arranged under the following headings: I. Introductory
material; II. Linguistics and Anthropology; III. Formalism; IV. Structuralism, texts and commentaries: (a) General, (b) Literary Criticism, (c)
Other fields; V. Semiotics; VI. Some relevant journals. It is intended both
to direct the beginning student towards the most helpful material in
those areas covered by this book, and to suggest further reading for
those who wish to move beyond its evident limitations. Some basic reading patterns in connection with particular topics are suggested at the
end.
I. INTRODUCTORY MATERIAL, ANTHOLOGIES, COLLECTIONS OF
ESSAYS
1. caws, peter, ‘What is Structuralism?’, Partisan Review, Vol. 35, No. I,
Winter 1968, pp. 75–91. Straightforward introductory essay.
2. de george, richard t. and fernande m. (eds), The Structuralists:
from Marx to Lévi-Strauss (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books,
1972). A useful, if rather wide-ranging collection containing material
by Marx, Freud, Saussure, Jakobson (‘Closing statement: linguistics
and poetics’), Lévi-Strauss (analysis, with Jakobson, of Baudelaire’s
bibliography
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Les Chats), Barthes, (‘The structuralist activity’ and ‘To write, an
intransitive verb?’) Althusser, Foucault, Lacan. Helpful overview
offered in the introduction.
ehrmann, jacques, (ed.), Structuralism (New York: Doubleday,
Anchor Books, 1970). Reprint of a special issue of Yale French Studies
(Nos. 36–7, 1966). Includes Lévi-Strauss, ‘Overture’ to Le Cru et le
cuit, Michael Riffaterre on the Lévi-Strauss-Jakobson analysis of
Baudelaire’s Les Chats, and articles on structuralism in the fields
of linguistics, anthropology, art, psychiatry and literature. Good
bibliographies up to 1968.
jefferson, ann and robey, david (eds), Modern Literary Theory:
A Comparative Introduction (London: Batsford, 1982). Contains
lucid introductory essays by Ann Jefferson on Russian Formalism,
structuralism and poststructuralism, together with valuable
bibliographies.
lane, michael (ed.), Structuralism, A Reader (London: Cape, 1970).
Contains some valuable material: Barthes, ‘Historical discourse’, and
‘Science versus literature’; Jakobson, ‘On Russian fairy tales’ as well
as the Lévi-Strauss–Jakobson analysis of Baudelaire’s Les Chats. Good
bibliography.
piaget, jean, Structuralism (Le Structuralisme, Paris: P.U.F., 1968)
translated and edited by Chaninah Maschler (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1971). One of the central texts, valuable for its ‘definitions’ (chapter I) and for its discussion of structuralism in the field
of mathematics, logic, biology, psychology, linguistics, philosophy
and the social sciences. Fairly advanced.
robey, david (ed.), Structuralism: An Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). Contains some helpful introductory pieces by
Lyons, ‘Structuralism and linguistics’, Culler, ‘The linguistic basis of
structuralism’, Leach, ‘Structuralism in social anthropology’, Eco,
‘Social life as a sign system’ and Todorov, ‘The structural analysis of
literature’.
sturrock, john (ed.), Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to
Derrida (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Valuable introductory essays by Sturrock (on Barthes), Dan Sperber (on Lévi-Strauss),
Hayden White (on Foucault), Malcolm Bowie (on Lacan) and
Jonathan Culler (on Derrida) which look beyond structuralism to
poststructuralism.
wahl, françois (ed.), Qu’est-ce-que le structuralisme? (Paris: Seuil,
1968). Wide-ranging collection of introductory essays, including
147
148 bibliography
Todorov on ‘Poetique’ and Wahl on ‘La philosophie entre l’avant et
l’après du structuralisme’.
II. LINGUISTICS AND ANTHROPOLOGY
10. benveniste, emile, Problems in General Linguistics (Problèmes de linguistique générale, Paris: Gallimard, 1966; Miami: University of
Miami Press, 1971). His distinction between story (l’histoire) and discourse (discours) has proved fruitful. See Culler, Structuralist Poetics,
pp. 197 ff. Advanced.
11. bloomfield, leonard, Language (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935). A
classic of American ‘structural’ linguistics.
12. carpenter, edmund and mcluhan, marshall, (eds), Explorations
in Communication (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960). Contains valuable
essays by Dorothy Lee, Carpenter, McLuhan and others.
13. cluysenaar, anne, Introduction to Literary Stylistics: A Discussion of
Dominant Structures in Verse and Prose, (London: Batsford, 1976).
14. freeman, donald c. (ed.), Linguistics and Literary Style (New York
and London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970). Interesting collection of essays, including Jan Mukařovský’s ‘Standard language and
poetic language’.
15. fries, charles c., Linguistics and Reading (New York and London:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). Chapter 2 ‘Linguistics: the study
of language’ offers a simple historical account of the subject’s
development: helps to establish bearings.
16. jakobson, roman, Selected Writings (4 vols.) (The Hague: Mouton,
1962–) Vol. I: Phonological Studies, 1962; Vol. II: Word and Language,
1971 (contains ‘Language in relation to other communication systems’ pp. 697–708, which maps the field of semiotics); Vol. III: Poetry
of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry (forthcoming); Vol. IV Slavic Epic
Studies, 1966.
17. —— Questions de Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1973). Includes a French
translation of ‘Poetry of grammar and grammar of poetry’ from Lingua, Vol. 21, 1968, pp. 597–609, and of Shakespeare’s Verbal Art in ‘Th’
Expence of Spirit (with Lawrence Jones) The Hague: Mouton, 1970).
Both these essays are worth looking at in either the English or the
French version. In connection with the latter, see I. A. Richards
‘Jakobson’s Shakespeare: the subliminal structures of a sonnet’, The
Times Literary Supplement, 28 May 1970, pp. 589–96.
18. —— ‘Closing statement: linguistics and poetics’ One of Jakobson’s
bibliography
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
most influential essays: essential reading. See Sebeok (ed.) Style in
Language (in this section).
—— and halle, morris, Fundamentals of Language (Janua Linguarum, Series Minor, I, The Hague: Mouton, 1956). Part II, ‘Two
aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances’ pp. 69–
96, is by Jakobson, and expounds his crucial distinction between
metaphor and metonymy.
—— see Culler, Jonathan ‘Jakobson and the linguistic analysis of
literary texts’, Language and Style, Vol. V, No. I, Winter 1971, pp.
53–66.
—— see Erlich, Victor ‘Roman Jakobson: grammar of poetry and
poetry of grammar’ in Chatman (ed.) Approaches to Poetics (see
section IV).
leach, edmund, Culture and Communication: the logic by which symbols are connected (London: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
Short, lucid and extremely helpful introduction to fundamental structuralist concepts in anthropology, which can profitably be read by
anyone interested in any aspect of structuralism and semiotics.
Designed for beginners. Good bibliography.
leech, g. n., A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (London: Longman,
1969). Useful introduction.
lévi-strauss, claude, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955); translated
and abridged, New York: Athenaeum, 1964; trans. John & Doreen
Weightman (London: Cape, 1973; Penguin Books, 1976). Personal –
and moving – account of his early anthropological work.
—— Structural Anthropology (Anthropologie Structurale, Paris: Plon,
1958); trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf
(London: Allen Lane, 1968; Penguin Books, 1972). Chapters II
(‘Structural analysis in linguistics and anthropology’) and XI (‘The
structural study of myth’) are particularly important.
—— The Scope of Anthropology (Leçon inaugurale, Collège de France,
Paris: Gallimard, 1960); trans. Sherry Ortner Paul & Robert A. Paul
(London: Cape, 1967).
—— Totemism (Le Totémisme aujourd’hui, Paris: P.U.F. 1962); trans.
Rodney Needham, with an introduction by Roger C. Poole (Penguin
Books, 1969). Poole’s introduction is very helpful.
—— The Savage Mind (La Pensée Sauvage, Paris: Plon, 1962; London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). An important work, with serious
implications for the European mind.
—— The Raw and the Cooked (Le Cru et le Cuit, Paris: Plon, 1964);
149
150 bibliography
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
trans. John & Doreen Weightman (London: Cape, 1970). This volume
and the following one perhaps represent Lévi-Strauss’s major
achievement, as a professional anthropologist.
—— From Honey to Ashes (Du Miel aux Cendres, Paris: Plon, 1966);
trans. John & Doreen Weightman (London: Cape, 1973).
—— ‘The Story of Asdiwal’ (Le Geste d’ Asdiwal) in Edmund Leach
(ed.), The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism (London: Tavistock,
1967) pp. 1–47. A fine example of ‘structural’ anthropology in action.
The same volume contains critical commentaries on Lévi-Strauss by
Mary Douglas, Nur Yalman and K. O. L. Burridge.
—— with Charbonnier, G., Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss,
trans. John and Doreen Weightman (London, Cape, 1969). Transcriptions of broadcasts. ‘Conversation’ covers art, poetry, music,
language.
—— See Steiner, George ‘Orpheus with his myths: Claude LéviStrauss’ in Language and Silence (London: Faber, 1967; Penguin
Books 1969, pp. 248–60).
—— see Hayes, E. Nelson and Tanya (eds), Claude Lévi-Strauss:
The Anthropologist as Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1970).
Interesting, with extensive bibliography.
—— see Leach, Edmund, Claude Lévi-Strauss (London: Fontana,
1970). Probably the best ‘basic’ introduction.
—— see Paz, Octavio, Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction (London:
Cape, 1970).
levin, samuel r., Linguistic Structures in Poetry (The Hague: Mouton,
1962) Janua Linguarum Series No. 23.
—— ‘The conventions of poetry’ see Chatman (ed.), Literary Style: A
Symposium in section IV.
minnis, noel (ed.), Linguistics at Large (London: Paladin, 1973).
Fourteen lectures given at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 1969–70. Interesting material by R. H. Robins, ‘The structure of
language’, George Steiner, ‘Linguistics and literature’ and Edmund
Leach, ‘Language and anthropology’ among others.
mukařovský, jan, ‘Standard language and poetic language’, an
important essay reprinted in the following anthologies listed in this
bibliography: (ed.) Freeman (this section); Garvin (section III);
Chatman and Levin (section IVb). His essay ‘The esthetics of
language’ in the Garvin vol. is also of interest.
pike, kenneth l., Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of Human
Behaviour (The Hague: Mouton, 1966).
bibliography
42. sapir, edward, Language (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1921).
43. —— Selected Writings in Language Culture and Personality, ed. David
G. Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949).
Classic works by an early American structural linguist. See especially
the essay ‘The status of linguistics as a science’ in the latter volume.
44. saussure, ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics (Cours de Linguistique Générale ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye with Albert Riedlinger, 1915); trans. Wade Baskin (New York: The Philosophical
Library Inc. 1959; New York: McGraw Hill, 1966; London: Peter Owen,
1960; London: Fontana, 1974).
45. —— See Culler, Jonathan, Saussure (London: Fontana, 1976). Valuable introduction, marking Saussure’s elevation to the status of
‘modern master’.
46. —— see starobinski, jean, Les Mots sur les Mots: Les anagrammes
de Ferdinand de Saussure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). An account of
Saussure’s latter-day interest in one aspect of literary structuralism:
anagrams.
47. sebeok, thomas a. (ed.), Style in Language (Cambridge, Mass.:
M.I.T. Press, 1960). Seminal collection of essays, ‘abstracts’ and
comments deriving from a 1958 conference of linguists, psychologists and literary critics. Of particular importance is Roman
Jakobson’s influential ‘Closing statement: linguistics and poetics’ pp.
350–77 which has become a standard point of reference for recent
work in the field.
48. —— a. (ed.), Linguistics and Adjacent Arts and Sciences (The Hague:
Mouton, 1973). This is volume 12 of the Current Trends In Linguistics
series, edited by Sebeok. In 3 Tomes, this survey contains sections on
Semiotics (Part Two: it includes Sebeok’s ‘Semiotics: a survey of the
state of the art’) and Linguistics and the verbal arts (Part Three). The
latter offers useful contributions from Frantisek Suejkovsky ‘History
of modern poetics’, Pierre Guiraud ‘Rhetoric and stylistics’ and
Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Literary genres’.
49. trager, george l. and smith, henry lee jr, An Outline of English
Structure (Washington: American Council of Learned Societies, 1951).
An influential example of American structural linguistics.
50. vico, giambattista, The New Science, a revised translation of the
third edn by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 1968). See above pp. 11–15.
51. whorf, benjamin lee, Language, Thought and Reality, ed. John B.
Carroll (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1956). Key texts in the devel-
151
152 bibliography
opment of the notion of cultural ‘relativity’, and of the anaesthetic
domination of the structure of a language over ‘reality’. An excellent
account and assessment of the work of Whorf and Sapir in this field
will be found in George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and
Translation (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) pp. 87–94.
III. FORMALISM
52. bennett, tony, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979).
53. erlich, victor, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (The Hague:
Mouton 1955, revised edn 1965). The fundamental introductory work.
54. —— ‘Russian Formalism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, October–
December 1973, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 627–38.
55. garvin, paul l. (ed. and trans.), A Prague School Reader on Aesthetics,
Literary Structure and Style (Washington DC: Georgetown University
Press, 1964). Contains Mukařovský’s ‘Standard language and poetic
language’.
56. hartman, geoffrey, Beyond Formalism (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1970).
57. jameson, fredric, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account
of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton and London:
Princeton University Press, 1972). A key work which makes an incisive critical analysis of the presuppositions of formalism and structuralism and offers a discriminating commentary on each. Necessary
reading for advanced students.
58. —— Marxism and Form (Princeton and London: Princeton University
Press, 1971). An assessment of Marxist critical theory against the
background of formalism. Jameson presents a carefully argued case
for a new ‘dialectical’ criticism, aware of structuralist and Marxist
implications, and capable of undermining the illusions deriving from
commitment to mere content of the work of art characteristic of
much contemporary criticism. An important book, for advanced
work.
59. jefferson, ann, see 4 above.
60. lemon, lee t. and reis, marion j. (eds and trans.), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).
Useful introduction, plus essays by Shklovsky, ‘Art as technique’
and ‘Sterne’s Tristram Shandy’, Tomashevsky, ‘Thematics’ and
Eichenbaum, ‘The theory of the formal method’.
61. matejka, ladislav and pomorska, krystyna (eds), Readings in
bibliography
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (Cambridge, Mass.:
M.I.T. Press, 1971). More extensive collection than Lemon and Reis,
but also more expensive. Includes Eichenbaum’s ‘The theory of the
formal method’ in a different translation, and his essay on ‘O. Henry
and the theory of the short story’, as well as work by Jakobson,
Tomashevsky, Tynjanov, Brik, Shklovsky and others.
propp, v. i., Morphology of the Folktale (Leningrad 1928) trans.
Laurence Scott, with an introduction by Svatava Pirkova-Jakobson
(Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1958; second edition
revised and ed. by Louis A. Wagner, with an introduction by Alan
Dundes, 1968). A basic text. See Hendricks in section IVb.
shklovsky, viktor, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs 1917–1922 trans.
Richard Sheldon (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1970).
Fascinating account of his exile and the ‘anarchy of life’ by a leading
spokesman of formalism.
—— Zoo: or letters not about love (1923) trans. Richard Sheldon (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1971). An experimental
novel that engagingly embodies some of Shklovsky’s formalist
theories.
todorov, tzvetan (ed.), Théorie de la littérature: textes des formalists
russes (Paris: Seuil, 1965). Selections from Russian formalists translated into French. An important collection, much of whose material is
now available in English in the volumes edited by Lemon and Reis
and by Matejka and Pomorska mentioned above.
wellek, rené, The Literary Theory and Aesthetics of the Prague School
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).
See also under Twentieth Century Studies in section VI.
IV. STRUCTURALISM: TEXTS AND COMMENTARIES
(a) General
67. benoist, jean-marie, La révolution structurale (Paris: Grasset, 1976).
Comprehensive and critical review of recent developments in
structuralist research. Advanced.
68. boudon, raymond, The Uses of Structuralism (A Quoi Sert La Notion
de Structure, Paris: Gallimard, 1968) trans. Michalina Vaughan
(London: Heinemann, 1971). Rather abstract critical account of the
concept of structure. Advanced.
153
154 bibliography
69. foucault, michel, The Order of Things: an archaeology of the human
sciences (Les mots et les choses, Paris: Gallimard, 1966; London:
Tavistock, 1970).
70. —— The Archaeology of Knowledge (L’Archéologie du Savoir, Paris:
Gallimard, 1969; trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, London: Tavistock,
1972). Foucault is a structuralist ‘historian’ of knowledge who
argues among other things for the ‘recent invention’ of the idea of
Man.
71. gardner, howard, The Quest for Mind: Piaget, Lévi-Strauss and the
Structuralist Movement (New York: Knopf, 1973).
72. macksey, richard and donato, eugenio (eds), The Structuralist
Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970 and 1972).
Papers and discussions from an internal symposium on ‘The languages of criticism and the sciences of Man’ held at Johns Hopkins
in 1966. A seminal collection, containing material from most of the
major structuralists: Goldmann, Todorov (‘Language and literature’)
Barthes (‘To Write: an intransitive verb’) Lacan, Derrida (‘Structure,
sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences’). Valuable for
advanced work.
73. pettit, philip, The Concept of Structuralism (London: Gill and
Macmillan, 1976). Philosophical analysis of structuralism’s premises.
(b) Structuralism and literary criticism
74. barthes, roland, Writing Degree Zero (Le Degré Zéro de L’Ecriture,
Paris: Seuil, 1953); trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London:
Cape, 1967). See above pp. 107–10.
75. —— On Racine (Sur Racine, Paris: Seuil, 1963); trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964).
76. —— Critical Essays (Essais Critiques, Paris: Seuil, 1964); trans. Richard
Howard (Evanston, Ill.: North-western University Press, 1972).
77. —— Critique et vérité (Paris: Seuil, 1966).
78. —— S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), trans. Richard Miller, with a preface by
Richard Howard (London: Cape, 1975). Possibly Barthes’s most brilliant work (see above pp. 114 ff). An exhilarating analysis, but not as
original as some of his commentators suggest. His five ‘codes’ of
meaning should be compared, as a modus operandi, with Empson’s
seven ‘types’ of ambiguity: see below, this section.
79. —— The Pleasure of the Text (Le Plaisir du Texte, Paris: Seuil, 1975);
bibliography
trans. Richard Miller, with a note on the text by Richard Howard
(London: Cape, 1976). See above, p. 115.
80. —— ‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’ see under
Communications and Working Papers in Cultural Studies in section VI.
81. —— ‘Science versus literature’, The Times Literary Supplement, 28th
September 1967, pp. 897–8. See also Lane (ed.) in section I.
82. —— ‘Style and its image’, see Chatman (ed.) this section and
Communications and Working Papers in Cultural Studies, section VI.
83. —— ‘To write, an intransitive verb’ see De George R. T. and F. M.
(eds) in section I and Macksey and Donato (eds) in section IV (a).
84. —— see Jonathan Culler, Barthes (London: Fontana 1983). The best
short introduction: lucid, condensed, accurate.
85. —— see Annette Lavers, Roland Barthes, Structuralism and After
(London: Methuen, 1982). The best full introduction: complex,
demanding, accurate.
86. —— see Philip Thody, Roland Barthes, A Conservative Estimate
(London: Macmillan, 1977). Oversimplifying anglicization; very
conservative.
87. —— see John Sturrock, ‘Roland Barthes – a profile’, The New Review
Vol. I, No. 2, May 1974, pp. 13–21.
For further works by Barthes see section V.
88. chatman, seymour (ed.), Literary Style: A symposium (London:
Oxford University Press, 1971). A valuable collection which includes
Barthes, ‘Style and its image’, Todorov, ‘The place of style in the
structure of the text’, Wellek, ‘Stylistics, poetics and criticism’ and
Samuel R. Levin, ‘The conventions of poetry’ among others.
89. —— (ed.), Approaches to Poetics (New York and London: Columbia
University Press, 1973). Includes Victor Erlich, ‘Roman Jakobson:
grammar of poetry and poetry of grammar’ – a valuable survey and
critique of Jakobson’s work, together with essays by Frank Kermode,
Richard Ohmann, Stanley Fish, Todorov and others.
90. —— ‘New ways of analyzing narrative structure’, Language and Style,
Vol. 2, No. I, 1969, pp. 3–36. Deals with Propp, Barthes, Todorov, and
analyses Joyce’s ‘Eveline’.
91. —— and levin, samuel r. (eds), Essays on the Language of Literature
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967). Contains Mukařovský’s ‘Standard
Language and Poetic Language’ as well as essays by Jakobson and
Halliday.
92. culler, jonathan, Structuralist Poetics: structuralism, linguistics and
the study of literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).
155
156 bibliography
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
101.
103.
104.
Convincing argument for a new direction in structuralist criticism,
which also provides an informative introduction to the field. Excellent
bibliography. See above, pp. 158–60.
doubrovsky, serge, The New Criticism in France (Pourquoi la nouvelle critique?, Paris: Mercure de France, 1966); trans. Derek Coltman,
with an introduction by Edward Wasiolek (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973). A good account of the issues at stake
in the Picard-Barthes debate, with their implications for literary criticism at large. Wasiolek’s introduction offers a judicious assessment
of the arguments as they affect American ‘New Criticism’, and has an
excellent bibliography of Barthes, New Criticism and Russian
Formalism.
empson, william, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto, 1930,
1947; Penguin Books, 1961). Once considered a classic of ‘New Criticism’, this is a work which structuralists continue to find fascinating,
and have begun to claim for their own persuasion. It bears comparison with Barthes’s S/Z and is a key text in the development of
modern critical consciousness.
forrest-thomson, veronica, ‘Necessary artifice: form and theory
in the poetry of Tel Quel’, Language and Style, Vol. VI, No. I, 1973, pp.
3–26.
frye, northrop, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton and London:
Princeton University Press, 1957). A classic of North American
structuralism.
genette, gérard, Figures I (Paris: Seuil, 1966), Figures II, 1969, Figures III, 1972. Untreated in the present volume, Genette is an important figure in literary structuralism. See Culler, pp. 102 ff.
—— Mimologiques (Paris: Seuil, 1976). Words as ‘mimics’ of the
structures of reality.
goldmann, lucien, The Hidden God (Le Dieu Caché, Paris: Gallimard, 1959; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).
—— Pour une sociologie du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Goldmann develops an approach which combines Marxism and
structuralism. See Jameson, section III.
greimas, a. j., Sémantique Structurale (Paris: Larousse, 1966).
—— Du Sens (Paris: Seuil, 1970). See above pp. 87 ff. For further
works of Greimas see section V.
guillén, claudio, Literature as System (Princeton and London:
Princeton University Press, 1971).
heath, stephen, The Nouveau Roman: a Study in the Practice of
bibliography
105.
106.
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.
112.
113.
114.
115.
116.
Writing (London: Elek, 1972). The first chapter contains one of the
best accounts of the ‘structuralist’ view of the novel. See also his
‘Towards textual semiotics’ in Signs of the Times, under Heath et al.
(eds), in section V.
hendricks, william o., ‘Folklore and the structural analysis of literary texts’, Language and Style, Vol. III, No. 2, 1970, pp. 83–121. Deals
with Propp and others.
hill, archibald a., ‘An analysis of The Windhover: an experiment in
structural method’, PMLA Vol. LXX, No. 5, December 1955, pp. 968–
78. A good example of ‘early’ American structural criticism, deriving
from structural linguistics.
jameson, fredric, The Prison House of Language and Marxism and
Form. Both these works focus on literary criticism: see section III.
josipovici, gabriel, The World and the Book (London: Macmillan,
1971). Chapter 2, ‘Surfaces and structures’ gives a clear account of
the issues in the Picard-Barthes debate. Cf. Doubrovsky, this section.
kermode, frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of
Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). Not a work of
structuralist criticism, but Chapter 5 ‘Literary fiction and reality’
raises important issues.
lentricchia, frank, After The New Criticism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, London: Athlone Press, 1980; Methuen, 1983). Chapter
4 is on Structuralism; Chapter 5 is on Poststructuralism. Advanced.
lodge, david, The Modes of Modern Writing (London: Arnold, 1977,
1979). A sustained and largely successful attempt to apply Jakobson’s categories to Joyce, Stein, Hemingway, Lawrence, Woolf and
others. Lucid introduction to Jakobson.
—— Working With Structuralism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1981). A collection of essays rather loosely focused on the application
of structuralism to a variety of literary topics.
magliola, robert, ‘Parisian Structuralism confronts Phenomenology: the ongoing debate’, Language and Style, Vol. VI, No. 4, Fall
1973, pp. 237–48. A good survey of the scene.
niel, a., L’analyse structurale des textes (Paris: Mame, 1973).
picard, raymond, Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture? (Paris:
Pauvert, 1965). See Doubrovsky and Josipovici this section, also
above p. 111 ff.
scholes, robert, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974). The first
book-length introductory survey in English: useful bibliography.
157
158 bibliography
117. todorov, tzvetan, Grammaire du Décaméron (The Hague:
Mouton, 1969) see under Sebeok (ed.) Approaches to Semiotics in
section V.
118. —— Littérature et signification (Paris: Larousse, 1967). A structural
analysis of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
119. —— Poétique de la Prose Paris: Seuil, 1971). Essays on the theory of
fiction.
120. —— Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Seuil, 1970; translated by Richard Howard, Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973). Todorov is a prolific writer, and pieces by him will
be found under various headings elsewhere in this bibliography. See
Robey (ed.) and Wahl (ed.) in section I; Macksey and Donato (eds) in
section IV (a); Chatman (ed.) in section IV(b); Sebeok (ed.) in section
V; and under Communications, Poetics, Screen, Twentieth Century Studies, The Times Literary Supplement and Yale French Studies in section
VI. See also the extensive bibliography in Culler’s Structuralist Poetics,
and Scholes’s Structuralism in Literature.
121. watson, george, ‘Old furniture and “nouvelle critique” ’, Encounter,
February, 1975, pp. 43–54. Vigorous attack on structuralist criticism
and its ‘nationalistic’ character: ‘Its object is to allow a sense of
national grandeur to survive untouched.’
122. wellek, rené and warren, austin, Theory of Literature (2nd edn,
London: Cape, 1954; 3rd edn, Penguin Books, 1963). Places structuralism in a wider context.
123. wellek, rené, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1963). The essay on ‘The revolt against positivism
in recent European literary scholarship’ is rewarding.
(c) Structuralism and other fields
124. glucksmann, miriam, Structuralist Analysis in Contemporary Social
Thought (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974). Compares LéviStrauss and Althusser.
125. lacan, jacques, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in
Psychoanalysis, with an introduction by Anthony Wilden (Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968). A controversial
structuralist approach to psychoanalysis and language. See Lacan’s
contributions to De George (eds) and Ehrmann (ed.) in section I and
to Macksey and Donato (eds) in section IV (a). Wilden’s introduction
is complex but rewarding.
bibliography
126. metz, christian, Film Language (London: Oxford University Press,
1974).
127. —— Language and Cinema (The Hague: Mouton, 1974) see under
Sebeok (ed.) Approaches to Semiotics, section V. Metz is the foremost
structuralist (or ‘semioticist’) analyst of film, and his books must be
regarded as basic texts in this field. See the special issue of Screen
mentioned in section VI.
V. SEMIOTICS
128. barthes roland, Mythologies (a selection from Mythologies, Paris:
Seuil, 1957); trans. Annette Lavers (London: Cape, 1972; Paladin,
1973). A series of incisive and often amusing short studies of
contemporary ‘myths’, followed by one of the fundamental texts of
modern semiotic theory; ‘Myth today’.
129. —— Elements of Semiology (Eléments de Sémiologie, Paris: Seuil,
1964); trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Cape, 1967).
See above, pp. 133 ff. Another fundamental text. Rather abstract: it
helps to read ‘Myth today’ first.
130. —— Système de la Mode (Paris: Seuil, 1967). The semiotics of fashion-writing.
131. —— ‘La linguistique du discours’. See Greimas (ed.) Sign, Language,
Culture, this section.
132. —— ‘Rhetoric of the image’ (‘Rhetorique de l’image’) see Communications and Working Papers in Cultural Studies in section VI.
133. birdwhistell, ray l., Kinesics and Context (London: Allen Lane, The
Penguin Press, 1971). Classic essays on bodily communication.
134. coquet, jean-claude, Semiotique Littéraire (Paris: Mame, 1973).
135. —— and kristeva, julia, ‘Sémanalyse: conditions d’une sémiotique
scientifique’, Semiotica No. 5, 1972, pp. 324–49.
136. corti, maria, An Introduction to Literary Semiotics (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1978).
137. culler, Jonathan, The Pursuit of Signs (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1981). A wide-ranging collection of essays which offers
an over-view of the contribution of semiotics to literary criticism as
well as more specific studies.
138. derrida, Jacques, De La Grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967).
139. —— L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967). See above pp. 145 ff.
140. —— ‘Sémiologie et grammatologie’, Social Science Information, Vol.
7, No. 3, 1968, pp. 135–48.
159
160 bibliography
141. —— ‘The ends of man’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
Vol. XXX, 1969–70, pp. 31–57.
142. eco, umberto, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington and London:
Indiana University Press, 1976). A re-working and revision by the
author, in English, of previous work, including La struttura assente
(Milan: Bompiani, 1968), and Le forme del contenuto (Milan:
Bompiani, 1971). A formidable attempt at a unified theory: not for
beginners, but valuable to work through.
143. —— The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979). Nine essays on
diverse subjects ranging from metaphor to Superman.
144. —— and del buono, e., The Bond Affair (London: Macdonald,
1966). Interesting analyses of the James Bond novels, including
Eco’s ‘Narrative Structure in Fleming’ pp. 37–75, developed from his
article ‘James Bond: une combinatoire narrative’, Communications
No. 8, 1966: see section VI.
145. elam, keir, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen,
1980).
146. Greimas, a. j. (ed.), Sign, Language, Culture (The Hague: Mouton,
1970). Includes Barthes’s ‘La linguistique du discours’, and sections
on ‘The semiotics of film’ and ‘The semiotics of literature’ among
many others.
147. —— (ed.), Essais de Sémiotique Poétique (Paris: Larousse, 1971).
Includes work by Kristeva on Mallarmé as well as Greimas’s interesting essay ‘Pour une théorie du discours poétique.’
148. guiraud, pierre, Semiology (La Sémiologie, Paris: P.U.F. 1971); trans.
George Gross (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). Somewhat
compressed account of general principles, but offers a valuable
survey of the field.
149. hall, edward t., The Silent Language (New York: Doubleday,
1959). Classic account of non-verbal communication as a part of
culture.
150. heath, stephen, mccabe, colin and prendergast, c. (eds), Signs
of the Times (Cambridge: Granta, 1971). Interesting collection of
essays, somewhat difficult to obtain. Includes ‘A conversation with
Roland Barthes’, Heath’s ‘Towards textual semiotics’ and Kristeva’s
‘The semiotic activity’.
151. hervey, sandor, Semiotic Perspectives (London, Allen and Unwin,
1982). Thoroughgoing account of the whole field of semiotics: especially valuable distinction between Saussure and Peirce. Advanced.
bibliography
152. hinde, r. a., Non-verbal communication (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1972).
153. jakobson, roman, Coup de l’oeil sur le developpement de la sémiotique
(Studies in Semiotics 3, Research Center for Language and Semiotic
Studies, Bloomington, Indiana, 1975).
154. —— ‘Language in relation to other communication systems’,
Selected Writings Vol. II (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 697–708.
Maps the whole field of semiotics.
155. kristeva, julia, Sémiotiké: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris:
Seuil, 1969). A collection of previously published essays by a key
member of the radical Tel Quel group.
156. —— Le Texte du Roman (The Hague: Mouton, 1971) an ‘approche
semiologique’. See Sebeok (ed.) this section.
157. —— La révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974).
158. —— ‘The semiotic activity’ see under Heath et al. (eds) this section,
and under Screen in section VI.
159. —— ‘The system and the speaking subject’ see under The Times Literary Supplement in section VI.
160. —— with rey-debove, j., and umiker, d.j. (eds), Essays in Semiotics
(The Hague: Mouton, 1971). See Sebeok (ed.) this section.
161. morris, charles, Writings on the General Theory of Signs (The Hague:
Mouton, 1971). A valuable collection of work by one of the most
influential American semioticians. See Sebeok (ed.) this section.
162. peirce, charles sanders, Collected Papers (8 vols.) ed. Charles
Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1931–58). One of the two (with Saussure)
founding fathers of modern semiotic studies, Peirce’s writings are
central and crucial to any advanced work in the field. A comprehensive 15 volume edition of Peirce’s works, edited by Max H. Fisch and
Edward C. Moore, is in preparation. When it appears it will constitute
the first publication of much of his writing, and will enable a broader
acknowledgement of its worth to be made.
163. rewar, walter, ‘Semiotics and communication in Soviet criticism’,
Language and Style, Vol. IX, No. I, Winter 1976, pp. 55–69. Surveys
some recent work.
164. riffaterre, michael, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1978; London: Methuen, 1980). Interesting original
statement by a major critic.
165. scholes, robert, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1982). Ebullient collection of essays
161
162 bibliography
intended as a companion to the author’s Structuralism in Literature
(116 above). Provocative and informative.
166. sebeok, thomas a. (ed.), Approaches to Semiotics (The Hague: Mouton, 1969–). A series of books (including a paperback ‘sub-series’)
dealing with a wide variety of contributions to the theory of signs.
Includes Harley C. Shand’s Semiotic Approaches to Psychiatry (Vol. 2,
1970) as well as Todorov’s Grammaire du Décaméron (Vol. 3, 1969)
and the volume ed. Kristeva, Rey-Debove and Umiker, Essays in Semiotics (Vol. 4, 1971) listed above. This is a massive collection, in English and French, of articles reprinted from the journal Social Science
Information, and includes contributions from Kristeva, Derrida,
Rulon Wells, Guiraud, Chatman and others, as well as a ‘Bibliographie sémiotique 1964–5’ by Todorov et al. Further volumes in the
series include Kristeva’s Le Texte du Roman (Vol. 6, 1971), the works
by Charles Morris and Christian Metz listed above, and Segre’s
Semiotics and Literary Criticism (Vol. 35, 1973) listed below. Many other
volumes are in preparation.
167. segre, cesare, Semiotics and Literary Criticism (I Segni e la Critica,
Torino Einaudi: 1969) trans. John Meddemmen (The Hague:
Mouton, 1973).
168. todorov, tzvetan, ‘Perspectives sémiologiques’, Communications
No. 7, 1966, pp. 139–45.
VI. SOME RELEVANT JOURNALS
169. Bulletin of Literary Semiotics (BLS) ed. Daniel Laferrière, Dept. of
German and Russian, Tufts University, Medford, Mass., USA. An
international ‘newsletter’ designed to inform about work in progress,
conferences, publications, etc. Its first issue appeared in May 1975
and included a bibliography of recent work. The second issue
(September 1975) contains a valuable history and survey of the field
by Sebeok: ‘The semiotic web: a chronicle of prejudices’.
170. Communications (published by the École Pratique des Hautes Études,
Paris) has produced some of the most influential work in the field of
structuralism. No. 8 (1966) is devoted wholly to the structural analysis of the text (récit) and contains some important statements, particularly Barthes’s ‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’ and
Todorov’s ‘Les catégories du récit littéraire’. Barthes’s ‘Rhetorique
de l’image’ appears in No. 4 (1964) and Todorov’s ‘Perspectives
sémiologiques’ appears in No. 7 (1966).
bibliography
171. Language and Style ed. E. L. Epstein, Dept of English, Queens College,
City University of New York, Flushing, New York, USA. Publishes
material on all aspects of stylistics, including semiotics.
172. Poetics, published by Mouton, The Hague, since 1971. Contains structuralist analyses.
173. Poetics Today published by the Institute of Poetics and Semiotics, Tel
Aviv University, Israel. Deals with all aspects of poetics, particularly
descriptive poetics and semiotics. The Institute also publishes a
series of ‘Papers in Poetics and Semiotics’.
174. Poétique, published by Seuil, Paris. Edited by Genette and Todorov,
publishes structuralist analyses.
175. Screen (The Journal of the Society for Education in Film and Television) has published a special double issue (Vol. 14, Nos 1 & 2,
Spring/Summer 1973) devoted to ‘Cinema semiotics and the work of
Christian Metz’. Includes valuable reprints of essays by Todorov
(‘Semiotics’), Kristeva (‘The semiotic activity’) together with pieces
by Metz, Heath and others. Good bibliography.
176. Semiotica, Journal of the International Association for Semiotic
Studies (IASS). Ed. Sebeok, published by Mouton.
177. Tel Quel, published by Seuil, Paris. The most radical of the journals
associated with structuralism and semiotics. Under the direction of a
committee, it pursues ‘une théorie et une pratique révolutionnaires
de l’ecriture’ through focusing on new forms of fiction, philosophy,
science, and political analysis. Cf. Veronica Forrest-Thomson in section IV(b). A collection of essays by writers associated with the
journal was published as Théorie d’Ensemble (Paris: Seuil, 1968). It
contains work by Barthes, Derrida, Philippe Sollers, Kristeva,
Foucault and others.
178. The Times Literary Supplement has devoted two special issues to
semiotics under the title ‘The Tell-Tale Sign’ on 5 and 12 October
1973. These contain particularly interesting essays by Todorov (‘Artistic language and ordinary language’), Tullio de Mauro (‘The link
with linguistics’), Eco (‘Looking for a logic of culture’) (5 October),
and by Kristeva (‘The system and the speaking subject’) and Stephen
Ullmann (‘Natural and conventional Signs’) (12 October). The essays
have been revised and collected in The Tell-Tale Sign: A Survey of
Semiotics ed. Sebeok, Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press, 1975.
179. Twentieth Century Studies (Faculty of Humanities, University of Kent at
Canterbury). Issue No. 3 (May 1970) is devoted to structuralism and
contains important material: e.g. Roger Poole (‘Structures and
163
164 bibliography
materials’), Jean-Marie Benoist (‘The end of structuralism’), Todorov
(‘The fantastic in fiction’) Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (‘Cinema and
structuralism’). Double issue No. 7/8 (December 1972) is devoted to
Russian Formalism and includes work by Todorov (‘Some
approaches to Russian Formalism’) Kristeva (‘The ruin of a poetics’)
and Richard Sherwood (‘Shklovsky and the development of early
formalist theory of prose literature’).
180. Working Papers in Cultural Studies (WPCS) published by the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham. WPCS I
(1971) includes a translation of Barthes’s ‘Rhetorique de l’image’.
WPCS 3 (1972) includes Eco’s ‘Towards a semiotic inquiry into the TV
message’ and a valuable bibliography of ‘Ideological analysis of the
message’ by Marina de Camargo. WPCS 5 (1974) includes Fredric
Jameson on ‘The vanishing mediator: narrative structure in Max
Weber’. WPCS 6 (1974) includes Iain Chamber’s critical analysis
‘Roland Barthes: structuralism/semiotics’. WPCS 9 (1976) includes
Charles Woolfson ‘The semiotics of working class speech’ and
Andrew Tolson ‘On the semiotics of workers’ speech’. The Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies also produces a series of stencilled
Occasional Papers, including a translation of Barthes’s ‘Introduction
à l’analyse structurale des récits’ (No. 6) and, earlier, Tim Moore’s
Lévi-Strauss and the Cultural Sciences as Occasional Pamphlet No. 4.
This offers, in an Appendix, some ‘Notes towards the analysis of the
James Bond Stories’ (cf. Eco and Del Buono, The Bond Affair in section V).
181. Yale French Studies Nos 36–7 (1966) were devoted to structuralism
and have been published as a separate volume: see Ehrmann (ed.)
section I. The journal periodically publishes relevant material, and
Nos 44 and 45 both contain essays by Todorov (‘Valéry’s poetics’ and
‘The discovery of language: Les liaisons dangereuses and Adolphe’
respectively).
182. Finally, two new series of volumes, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, have
recently been announced by the Research Center for Language and
Semiotic Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana:
Advances in Semiotics (Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics, see section V, is
one of this series) and Studies in Semiotics (Jakobson’s Coup de l’oeil
sur le developpement de la sémiotique, see section V, appears in this
series).
bibliography
Some suggested reading patterns
The following sequences of reading are suggested as reasonably basic
(though not exhaustive) introductions to the topics indicated, beginning
with the simplest exposition and moving by degrees towards a greater
complexity. Clearly, the areas covered by some of the topics will overlap and
a number of items will recur in different contexts and in different patterns.
To a certain degree this can be said to act as a measure of their significance.
The numbers refer to the items as listed in the above bibliography.
Structuralism: (a) Introduction for beginners: 1; 2 (particularly the introduction); 116; 7 (particularly Lyons, Culler, Leach and Eco); 4; 22. (b)
More advanced studies: 6; 8; 67–73.
2. Semiotics: (a) Introduction for beginners: 136; 7 (Eco); 145 (the early
chapters); 148, 22; 128; 178; 165. (b) More advanced studies: 151; 48
(Sebeok’s ‘survey of the state of the art’); 129; 150; 153–4; 135; 158;
159–65; 180 (particularly WPCS 3, 6 and 9); 142.
3. The anthropological basis of structuralism: 7 (Leach); 4; 22; 25–31; 35; 50.
4. The linguistic basis of structuralism: 7 (Lyons, Culler); 4; 8; 15; 22; 11; 39
(Leach); 49; 41.
5. Linguistics and anthropology: 22; 25; 28; 27; 39 (Leach: compare the later
22); 42; 43; 51 (these last three items constitute the basis of the SapirWhorf ‘hypothesis’ concerning language and culture. See especially
Steiner, 51 and compare Vico, 50.
6. Linguistics and literature: 39 (Steiner); 14; 23; 37; 38; 40; 47 (particularly
Jakobson); 17; 20; 55; 88–91; 106; 171. And see Jakobson below.
7. Formalism: 52; 54; 53; 59; 57; 58.
8. Structuralism and literary criticism: 116; 4; 8; 93 (particularly the introduction); 104; 112; 94 and then compare with 78; 2 or 5 (Lévi-Strauss
and Jakobson on Baudelaire) and then compare with 3 (Riffaterre);
17 (Jakobson on Shakespeare and then Richards on Jakobson);
179 (May 1970, particularly Todorov); 47 (Jakobson’s ‘Closing
Statement’) and then compare 21 and 20. As an antidote 121.
9. Semiotics and literary criticism: 165; 145; 143; 137; 164; 167; 136; 151.
10. Saussure: basic: 44; 45; more complex: 57; 92.
11. Lévi-Strauss: basic: 33; 35; 36; 22; more complex: 71; with Jakobson: 5.
12. Jakobson: basic: 18–21; more complex: 2; 5; 3 (Riffaterre); 111; 153; 154.
13. Barthes: basic: 84; more complex: 76; 85; 78–83. With reference to
semiotics, 128 (read the amusing short studies, but ‘Myth today’ is
basic), followed by the earlier 129 and 130.
14. The Barthes-Picard debate: 84; 87; 85; the debate itself: 75; 115; 77.
1.
165
FURTHER READING (2003)
I have argued that ‘classic’ structuralism in literary criticism virtually ends
with Roland Barthes’s S/Z (see pp. 94–99). That book’s testing, virtually
to destruction, of the codes that form the basis of its own analysis more or
less opened the floodgates to the deconstructive tide that followed. It also
made the drawing up of a list of works for ‘further’ reading in respect of
structuralism rather problematical. In one sense, literary structuralism
went and could go no further. But of course this did not prevent a daunting
number of books being written about it, including my own. Structuralism
and Semiotic’s original Bibliography, with its sub-divisions and reading
patterns, still strikes me as reasonably adequate, if by no means comprehensive. The aim of the following much more modest addition to it is
briefly to draw attention to some of the salient developments in critical
theory that have succeeded structuralism, in particular those which, whilst
not necessarily deriving directly from its precepts, may be said to have
been marked – some would say shaped – by its perceptions as well as its
limitations and presuppositions. Needless to say, it is in the nature of the
rapidly overlapping expansion of the subject that the sub-divisions in this
case are almost wholly arbitrary.
BEYOND STRUCTURALISM
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith, London: Tavistock Publications, 1972.
further reading (2003)
—— The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: Random House;
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984.
John Sturrock (ed.), Structuralism and Since: from Levi-Strauss to Derrida,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. See also the chapter on ‘PostStructuralism’ in the same author’s Structuralism, London: Grafton
Books (Collins), 1986, pp. 136–65.
Josué V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist
Criticism, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979; London:
Methuen, 1980.
Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1981.
Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text: a Post-structuralist Anthology, London:
Routledge, 1981.
Richard Harland, Superstructuralism: the Philosophy of Structuralism and
Post-Structuralism, London and New York: Methuen, 1987.
DECONSTRUCTION
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Derrida’s analysis
of Saussure (pp. 27–73) is crucial.
Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction,
London: Routledge; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981.
—— On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, London:
Routledge, 1983.
Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (New Accents series), London and New York, Routledge 1982. (second edition 2002).
—— Derrida, London: Fontana Press, 1987.
POSTMODERNISM
Jacques Lacan, Écrits, a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, London and New
York: Tavistock Publications, 1977 (see also Malcolm Bowie, Lacan,
London: Fontana Press, 1991).
—— The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan
Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
—— Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
(revised edn), London: Methuen 1983.
—— The Resistance to Theory, Manchester University Press, 1986.
167
168 further reading (2003)
Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1982.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act, London: Routledge 1981.
—— ‘Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left
Review 146, 1984, pp. 53–93.
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
1983; London: Faber, 1984.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. R. Durand,
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986.
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, London: Routledge, 1988.
Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, Brighton: Harvester, 1989.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989.
Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism, Brighton:
Harvester, 1990.
—— The Truth About Postmodernism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture, Oxford: Blackwell,
1994.
INDEX
Althusser, Louis, 147, 159
Ambiguity, 49, 63, 78, 81–2, 90,
116–19, 126–29 passim., 141
Analogy, 36–8, 59, 63
Anthropology, 7, 8–43 passim., 142,
148 ff.; and linguistics, 18–21,
40–43, 45, 100–101, 136–7, 142,
148ff., 165; and writing systems,
35ff., 39
Aristotle, 35
Arnold, Matthew, 140
Art and society, 42–3; and reality,
118–19, 120–23; autonomy in art,
46, 126; forms of art, 46, 80; laws
of art, 46, 55–6
Bacon, Francis, 1
Bally, Charles, 151
Balzac, Honoré de, Sarrasine, 94–9,
118
Barthes, Roland, 66, 69, 86–99,
101n., 106–24, 127–33 passim.,
144, 147, 154–5, 159–65 passim.;
Writing Degree Zero, 87, 88, 154,
156; Mythologies, 89, 106n., 107,
108, 159; Sur Racine, 90, 127, 154;
Critique et Verité, 90ff., 130n., 154;
S/Z, 92, 94–9 passim., 123, 125,
130, 154 , 166; Le Plaisir du Texte,
93ff., 154; Elements of Semiology,
99, 101n., 109, 110n., 159;
Système de la Mode,159; L’Empire
des Signes, 98; on style, 87ff. ; on
codes, 86–99; on jouissance, 93–4,
98–9; on myth, 107–24; on
writing, 88ff., 91–4ff., 121, 130–31;
the ‘writerly’, 91–3ff., 96, 117; the
‘readerly’, 92–3ff., 96; on reading,
88ff., 91–4; theory of
semiotics, 106–24 passim.;
denotation and connotation,
109ff., 117; ‘science of forms’, 131;
170 index
debate with Picard, 90ff., 156 , 157,
165
Baskin, Wade, 10, 151
Baudelaire, Pierre Charles, 146–7,
165
Becket, Samuel, 92, 123
Belsey, Catherine, 168
Bennett, Tony, 152
Benoist, Jean-Marie, 120n., 153, 164
Benveniste, Emile, 148
Bergin, Thomas Goddard, 2, 4, 151
Bergson, Henri, 41–2
Bernanos, Georges, 75
Binary oposition, 12–13, 22, 59–60,
69–70, 72, 74, 122
Birdwhistell, Ray, 159
Birmingham, 134, 164
Bloomfield, Leonard, 17, 57, 148
Boas, Franz, 17, 57
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 77
Bond, James, 160, 164
Book of Common Prayer, The, 22
Boudon, Raymond, 153
Bowie, Malcolm, 147, 167
Brecht, Bertolt, 47
Bricolage, 36–37, 98, 139
Brik, Osip, 45, 54, 153
Brooke-Rose, Christine, 113, 123
Brooks, Cleanth, 127
Burks, Arthur W., 103n., 161
Burridge, K. O. L., 150
Camus, Albert, 87
Canonization, 55
Cardiff, x, 137–38
Carpenter, Edmund, 19n., 148
Carroll, John B., 151
Caws, Peter, 146
Chambers, Iain, 164
Charbonnier, G., 150
Chatman, Seymour, 149, 150, 155,
158, 162
Cherkess culture, 23
Chomsky, Noam, 10, 70, 136
Cluysenaar, Anne, 148
Codes, 19, 30, 31ff.; totemic code, 39,
65–9, 83ff., 86–99, 101, 116,
117ff., 120
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 140, 141,
Biographia Literaria, 139
Coltman, Derek, 156
Comedy, 81ff.
Competence and performance, 10,
70 (see Saussure, langue and
parole)
Convention, 9–10, 56, 98
Copenhagen (glossematic) school,
57
Coquet, Jean-Claude, 159
Corti, Maria, 159
Culler, Jonathan, ix, 64 andn., 72, 83,
115n., 120n., 131, 132–33, 147–51
passim., 155, 158, 159, 165, 167
cummings, e. e., 113–15
Dakota, the, 41
De Camargo, Marina, 164
De George, Richard T. and
Fernande M., 29, 146, 155, 158
Del Buono, E., 160, 164
De Man, Paul, 167
De Mauro, Tullio, 163
Derrida, Jacques, 120–24, 132, 142,
147, 154, 159–60, 162, 163, 167;
deconstruction, 142, 167;
grammatology,120, 123ff., 128,
159; ‘presence’, 120–24 passim.;
writing, 120–24, 128, 132;
différence and différance, 120,
121–22, 159
index
Detergents, 89
Dickens, Charles, 75
Donato, Eugenio, 77n., 91n., 123n.,
154, 155
Doubrovsky, Serge, 128, 130n., 156,
157
Douglas, Mary, 150
Dundes, Alan, 153
Eco, Umberto, 101n., 104n., 106n.,
110, 116, 117, 147, 160, 163, 164,
165
Ehrmann, Jacques, 147, 158, 164
Eichenbaum, Boris, 44, 45, 152,
153
Einstein’s brain, 89
Elam, Keir, 160
Eliot, T. S., 41–2, 87, 126, 140, 142
Empiricism, 26, 41
England and ‘englishness’, 137–8,
140
‘English’ (academic subject), 142
Empson, William, 90, 127, 154, 156
Epstein, E. L., 163
Erlich, Victor, ix, 45–56
passim., 57–9, 149, 152, 155
Existentialism, 4
Fables, 2
Fairy-tales, 51ff.
Feibleman, James K., 103n.
Fisch, Max Harold, 2, 4, 151, 161
Fish, Stanley, 155
Flaubert, Gustave, 87
Folk-tales, 51ff
Food, 38–9, 99
Foregrounding, 58, 62, 63
Form, 43–4, 50, 80, 130–31
Formalism (including Russian
Formalism), 44–56, 58, 59ff.,
65–9, 91, 92, 126, 147, 152–3, 156,
164, 165
Forrest-Thomson, Veronica, 156, 163
Foucault, Michel, 147, 154, 163, 166
Fowler, Roger, 72n.
Frazer, James George, 62n
Freeman, Donald, 148, 150
Freud, Sigmund, 62n., 146
Fries, Charles C., 17, 148
Frye, Northrop, 156
Function, 52–3, 57–9, 65–9
passim., 70, 74
Galileo, 1
Gardner, Howard, 154
Garvin, Paul L., 58n, 150, 152
Genette, Gérard, 156, 163
Genre, 80–86
Glucksmann, Miriam, 158
Goldmann, Lucien, 154, 156
Grammar of texts, 71–80 passim.
Greimas, A. J., 69–76, 77, 99, 102,
156, 159, 160; on narrative
structure, 69ff., 72ff.; on
semantics, 69–76; ‘elementary
structure of signification’, 69ff.,
99; enunciation-spectacle, 70,
72; actantial model, 70–76
passim.
Gross, George, 160
Grundfest, Brooke, 149
Guillén, Claudio, 156
Guiraud, Pierre, 101n., 106n., 117n.,
151, 160, 162
Hall, Edward T., 160
Halle, Morris, 12, 59, 149
Halliday, M. A. K., 155
Harari, Josué V., 167
Harland, Richard, 167
171
172 index
Hartley, John, ix
Hartman, Geoffrey, 140, 141n., 152,
168
Hartshorne, Charles, 103n., 161
Hawkes, Terence, 37n., 80n.
Hayes, E. Nelson and Tanya, 150
Heath, Stephen, 156–7, 160, 161, 163
Heidegger, Martin, 132
Hemingway, Ernest, 87, 157
Hendricks, W. O., 153, 157
Henry, O., 153
Hervey, Sandor, 160
Hill, Archibald A., 157
Hinde, R. A., 161
Hjelmslev, Louis, 57
Howard, Richard, 154, 158
Hutcheon, Linda, 168
James, Henry, 84n., 85
Jameson, Fredric, ix, 7, 9, 45, 49, 50,
51, 62, 70n., 71, 74n., 75n., 79–80,
88, 89, 120, 152, 156, 157, 164, 168
Jazz, 31, 98–9
Jefferson, Ann, 147, 152
Johnson, Barbara, 167
Jones, Lawrence, 148
Josipovici, Gabriel, 131n., 157
Joyce, James, 87, 92, 112, 123, 155,
157
Jump, John D., ix
Incest, 23
Intertextuality, 119
Lacan, Jacques, 62, 147, 154, 158, 167
Laferrière, Daniel, 162
Lane, Michael, 57n., 147
Language, as structure, 5–7, 8–43,
57 passim.; as system of signs, 39,
76ff., 100–124; and reality, 56;
and culture, 76–86 passim., 96–7,
136ff.; and coding, 19ff; and
myth,107–24; ‘ordinary’
language, 45, 46ff., 58; ‘literary’
use of language, 44 -56, 58,
59–69, 85ff., 115ff., 119–24
passim.; 126ff.; duplicity, 52;
American Indian languages,
16–19, 41–2, 56, 137
Langue and parole, see Saussure
Lavers, Annette, 99n., 154, 155, 159
Lawrence, D. H., 157
Leach, Edmund, 40–41, 147, 149,
150, 165
Leavis, F. R., 90, 139, 140
Lee, Dorothy, 19, 148
Jacobson, Clare, 149
Jakobson, Roman, 12, 44, 45–6, 48,
54, 57, 58, 59–69, 80, 91, 92, 105,
110, 111, 115, 116, 127–8, 146–49
passim., 151, 153, 155, 157, 161, 164,
165; on polarities, 59ff.; on
equivalence, 59ff., 63; on aphasia,
59ff, 149; on metaphor and
metonymy, 33, 59ff., 63ff., 149; on
the poetic function of language,
48, 54 , 59, 61ff., 63, 64, 65–9.,
91ff., 115–16, 127–8; on style,
61–3; on prose, 63ff; on
communication,102; on
functions, 58, 65, 66–9, 70, 115; as
link between Formalism and
Structuralism, 59ff., 65–9; on
signs/semiotics, 102–24, 127–8;
on writing, 111ff., 115
Kermode, Frank, 155, 157
Kinesics, 101, 159
Kristeva, Julia, 101–2, 119 , 159,
160–64 passim.
index
Leech, G. N., 149
Lemon, Lee T., 45, 46, 50, 53, 152, 153
Lentricchia, Frank, 157
Levin, Samuel R., 150, 155
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 19–43 passim.,
69, 74, 83, 86, 110, 118, 137, 146,
147, 149, 154, 158, 164, 165;
Structural Anthropology, 20–36
passim., 149; Tristes Tropiques, 20;
Le Cru et le Cuit, 27, 149; Totemism,
36–43, 149; The Savage Mind,
36–43, 149; on language and
culture, 20–43 passim., ; on
kinship, 21–25; on myth, 21,
25–35, 41, 52; on the ‘savage’
mind, 21, 27, 35–43, 69; on
shamanism, 26–27; on totems,
36–43, 69; on modern society,
40–43; on bricolage, 36–37, 98.
Linguistics, 7, 8–43 passim., 59–69,
101, 142, 148ff., 165; American
structural linguistics, 16–19, 28,
40–43, 45; European structural
linguistics, 45, 56–9; linguistics
and signs, 101–124 .
Literacy and orality, 35–43
‘Literariness’, 46–56, 59–69, 79ff.,
85ff., 88, 119, 138
Literature, 7, 44–56, 88, 90, 127; and
reading and writing, 35–43
passim., 76–86, 91–4, 128–33
passim.; and time, 41–2; and
myth, 41–3; and music, 43; and
reality, 40–43, 56; and
anthropology, 41–3; and codes,
65–9, 86–99, 130–33; literary
history, 126–8 passim.; literary
perception, 45ff., 55ff., 79ff., 88,
127, 138
Lodge, David, 157
Logic and myth, 28ff., 35; and
totemism, 36–43; and signs,
100ff.; ‘concrete’ logic, 36–38
passim.
Lyons, John, 147, 165
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 168
Macksey, Richard, 77n., 91n., 123n.,
154, 155, 158
Magliola, Robert, 157
‘Making strange’ (ostranenie), 47–56
passim., 138
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 123, 160
Man, invention of, 40, 120–21
Mandelbaum, David G., 151
Marx, Karl, (and marxism), 4, 20,
128, 146, 152, 156, 157
Maschler, Chaninah, 147
Matejka, Ladislav, 45n., 152, 153
McCabe, Colin, 160
McLuhan, Marshall, 19n., 119n., 148
Meddemmen, John, 162
Metaphor, 2, 5, 37n., 38, 46–56
passim., 59ff., 63ff., 143
Metonymy, see Metaphor
Metre, 47–9, 54 , 63
Metz, Christian, 159, 162, 163
Middle Ages, 97
Miller, Richard, 92n., 93n., 154
Mind, of human beings, 3, 6–7,
35–43; and coding, 39–40;
‘savage’ mind, 41–2
Minnis, Noel, 150
Moore, Edward C., 161
Moore, Tim, 164
Morphemes, 30
Morris, Charles, 161, 162
Moscow Linguistic Circle, 44
Mukarovský, Jan, 58n., 62, 148, 150,
152, 155
173
174 index
Mylne, Vivienne, 81n.
Myth, 2–3, 20, 25–35, 42; and
‘bundles’, 30ff.; and logic, 5–6, 35;
and art, 41; and literature, 42–3;
bourgeois myth, 86–99
passim., 107–24, 128–9;
‘mythemes’, 30, 33
Narrative, 49–99 passim.
Naturalism, 26, 40ff.
Needham, Rodney, 38n., 149
New Criticism, 125–33 passim., 141,
156
Newton, Isaac, 1
Niel, A., 157
Niven, David, 135
Norris, Christopher, 167, 168
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 164
Oedipus myth, 31–35,
Ohmann, Richard, 155
Onomatopoeia, 54
Oppositions, 12–13, 37–43
Osage, the, 41
Parody, 55
Paul, Sherry Ortner and Robert A.,
149
Paz, Octavio, 150
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 100–124
passim., 160, 161; logic, 100,
103–24 passim.; elements of
signification, 100–24 passim.;
triadic structures,103–5; classes
of sign,100–124; icon, index,
symbol, 105ff., 111ff.
Petrograd Society for the Study of
Poetic Language (OPOYAZ), 45
Pettit, Philip, 154
Phonemics and phonetics, 11–13,
17–18, 21, 22, 24, 27–36, 43,
46–56 passim., 69–70, 74; the
phonemic principle, 12, 22–25,
27–36, 122
Phonetics, see phonemics
Piaget, Jean, 5–7, 14, 55, 68, 147, 154
Picard, Raymond, 90, 156, 157, 165
Pike, Kenneth L., 150
Plato, 120
Plot (and story), 49ff., 68, 85
‘Poetic wisdom’, see Vico
Poetics, 45–56, 59–69, 76ff., 131–33 ;
poetics of fiction/prose, 49–56,
59–69, 76–86, 112ff., 131–33.
Poetry; ‘poetic truth’, 3–4; poetry
and language, 44–99; ‘poetical’
mode, 46–99 passim.; semiotics
of , 112ff.
Pomorska, Krystyna, 45n., 152, 153
Poole, Roger C., 38n., 39, 149, 163–4
Postmodernism, 167–8
Post-structuralism, 142, 147, 167
Poulet, Georges, 123, 125
Prague school, the, 57, 62, 66,
74–5, 84, 152
Prendergast, C., 179, 160
Propp, V. I., 51–3, 68, 72–77 passim.,
153, 155
Proust, Marcel, 92
Proxemics, 101
Pushkin, Alexander, Eugeny Onegin,
53,
Racine, Jean Baptiste, 90, 130
Rabinow, Paul, 167
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 22, 23
Reading, 35–43, 51 passim., 76–86,
91–4, 123–24, 128–33 passim., 144
(see Writing)
Realism, 40ff., 97ff.
index
Reis, Marion J., 45, 46, 50, 53, 152,
153
Renaissance, 97
Rewar, Walter, 161
Rey-Debove, J., 161, 162
Rhyme, 47–50, 54 , 63, 143
Rhythm, 47–50, 63, 143
Richards, I. A., 90, 126–7, 148,
165
Riedlinger, Albert, 151
Riffaterre, Michael, 147 , 161, 165
Robbe-Grillet, A., 123
Robey, David, 84n., 147, 158
Robins, R. H., 150
Rorty, Richard, 168
Said, Edward, 168
Sapir, Edward, 17, 18–19, 20, 57,
76, 83, 86, 90, 102, 151, 152,
165
Sarup, Madan, 168
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 8–16, 51,
54, 56, 57, 59ff., 69, 92, 101, 106,
131, 146, 151, 160, 161, 165, 167 ;
diachronic and synchronic, 8–9,
12–15, 30–35, 60ff.; langue and
parole, 9–10, 26–35 passim., 56,
69, 70, 81–124 passim., 131ff.;
phonetic and phonemic, 11–13;
signifier and signified, 14–16,
48–9, 54, 68, 88, 91–3 passim.,
98–9, 102, 105, 106ff., 120–24
passim., 127–30 passim.; the
linguistic sign, 14–15, 100ff.,
106ff.; syntagmatic and
associative modes, 14ff., 33, 49,
51ff., 59ff.; oppositions, 12–13,
15–16; on signs, 101n.102ff.
Scholes, Robert, ix, 77n., 81n., 85,
157, 158, 161–2
Scott, Lawrence, 51n.,
Sebeok, Thomas A., 61n., 151, 158,
159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165
Sechehaye, Albert, 151
Segre, Cesare, 162
Semantics, 69–76, 77ff.
Shakespeare, William, 80, 134–5,
145, 148, 165 ; Hamlet, 50 ; King
Lear, 71
Shand, Harley C., 162
Sheldon, Richard, 118, 153
Sheridan, Alan, 167
Sherwood, Richard, 164
‘Shifters’, 66ff.
Shklovsky, Viktor, 44, 45, 46–56
passim., 118, 139, 152, 153, 164
Signs, 10, 13–14, 105–24; science of,
101–124, 131
Simile, 61
Sioux, the, 41–2
Smith, A. M. Sheridan, 154, 166
Smith, Colin, 99n., 154, 159
Smith, Henry Lee Jr., 18, 151
Sollers, Phillippe, 122, 123n., 163
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 28, 31–35
Souriau, E., 72
Sperber, Dan, 147
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 167
Starobinski, Jean, 151
Stein, Gertrude, 157
Steiner, George, 150, 152, 165
Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy,
50, 92, 121, 123, 152
Sturrock, John, 94n. , 147, 155,
167
Suejkovsky, Frantisek, 151
Swansea, 139
Symbolism, 2, 41, 45, 62
Synecdoche, 61
Syntagm, 14–15
175
176 index
Tel Quel, 122, 161, 163; Théorie
d’Ensemble, 120n., 123n., 156
Thody, Philip, 155
Todorov, Tzvetan, 44, 76–86, 89, 92,
139, 147, 148, 153, 154, 155, 158,
162–65 passim.; Théorie de la
Littérature, 44, 153; on universal
grammar, 76ff.; on grammar of
narrative, 76–86 passim.; on
syntax, 77ff.; on The Decameron,
76, 77–9, 162; on the ‘fantastic’,
81–3; on genre, 81–86; on reading,
76–86 passim., 92
Tolson, Andrew, 164
Tomashevsky, Boris, 44, 53, 152, 153
Totemism, 21, 36–43 passim.
Tragedy, 81ff.
Trager, George L., 18, 151
Transformation, 5, 14, 29–30, 34, 38
Trnka, B., 57n
Trobriand culture, 23
Trubetskoy, Nikolay, 57
Tynyanov, Juri, 44, 153
Ullmann, Stephen, 163
Umiker, D.J., 161, 162
Valéry, Paul, 164
Vaughan, Michalina, 153
Vico, Giambattista, 1–5, 7, 118, 133,
151, 165; ‘poetic wisdom’, 2–5, 15,
20
Wagner, Louis A., 51n., 153
Wahl, Francois, 147–8, 158
Wales, 137–8
Warren, Austin, 158
Wasiolek, Edward, 156
Watson, George, 158
Weber, Max, 164
Weightman, John and Doreen, 149,
150
Weiss, Paul, 103n., 161
Wellek, René, 153 , 155, 158
Wells, Rulon, 162
White, Hayden, 147, 168
Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 18–21
passim., 57, 76, 83, 86, 90, 151,
152, 165
Wilden, A. G., 62n., 158
Williams, William Carlos, 113–15,
121
Winnebago, the, 29,
Woolf, Virginia, 157
Woolfson, Charles, 164
Writing, 35–43 passim., 51,
76–86, 91–4ff., 112–24
passim., 128–33 passim.,
(see Reading)
Yalman, Nur, 150
Young, Robert, 167
Zola, Émile, 87
Zoosemiotics, 101